Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2019 Jul 11;14(7):e0216335.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0216335. eCollection 2019.

Emergence of integrated institutions in a large population of self-governing communities

Seth Frey  1   2 , Robert W Sumner  3
Affiliations

Emergence of integrated institutions in a large population of self-governing communities

Seth Frey et al. PLoS One. .

Abstract

Most aspects of our lives are governed by large, highly developed institutions that integrate several governance tasks under one authority structure. But theorists differ as to the mechanisms that drive the development of such concentrated governance systems from rudimentary beginnings. Is the emergence of integrated governance schemes a symptom of consolidation of authority by small status groups? Or does integration occur because a complex institution has more potential responses to a complex environment? Here we examine the emergence of complex governance regimes in 5,000 sovereign, resource-constrained, self-governing online communities, ranging in scale from one to thousands of users. Each community begins with no community members and no governance infrastructure. As communities grow, they are subject to selection pressures that keep better managed servers better populated. We identify predictors of community success and test the hypothesis that governance complexity can enhance community fitness. We find that what predicts success depends on size: changes in complexity predict increased success with larger population servers. Specifically, governance rules in a large successful community are more numerous and broader in scope. They also tend to rely more on rules that concentrate power in administrators, and on rules that manage bad behavior and limited server resources. Overall, this work is consistent with theories that formal integrated governance systems emerge to organize collective responses to interdependent resource management problems, especially as factors such as population size exacerbate those problems.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1. Most communities are small and unsuccessful.
Larger successful communities have more rules governing more kinds of resources. We analyze 5,200 amateur-run web server communities. Each server is operated by an administrator who makes all governance decisions. Among these decisions is the server size (x-axis), the server's maximum number of users who may participate at any moment. This number represents an administrator's desired community size and puts a practical upper bound on the community's core group or success: the number of users who return to the community regularly (y-axis; all plots). Beyond return visits, unique monthly visits to many of these communities exceed the thousands. A. We summarize the data in a 2D histogram of all communities binned by success and size, with each bin reporting the number of communities within the given range, and marginals represented by grey ticks. Most communities have size 4–16, and most fail to grow a core group larger than one. The most interesting communities, those with the largest core group for their class, are along the diagonal upper edge of each plot. A bin's shade of grey, its number label, and the marginals all communicate the same distributional information redundantly: the count of communities by size and success. B. Administrators select their community's governance regime by installing combinations of software modules that implement rule systems. This panel shows the mean number of rules in use by communities in a bin. C. and D. All rules address some resource problem with some kind of rule. There are different problems and different rules (Fig 2), and we plot diversity metrics over them. Panel C shows that large successful communities use a greater variety of rules types ("rule diversity"). Panel D shows that they attend to a greater variety of resource problems ("rule scope").
Fig 2
Fig 2. Larger successful communities use rule systems with more types of rules governing more types of resources.
Actively managing physical server resources increases success with size. Each plot shows the mean number of rules per bin, per rule type (A) or target resource (B). The most common type of rule extends an administrator's power over their server. The resource challenge that attracts the greatest number of rules is the management of bad behavior. These two types, as well as rules that manage physical resources, increase in use significantly with population maximum (p<0.001). As their shared colors indicate, Fig 1C shows the diversity across the 4 plots of A, and Fig 1D represents the data over the 3 plots of B. For reference, both rows of figures roughly sum to Fig 1B.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Poteete AR, Ostrom E. Fifteen Years of Empirical Research on Collective Action in Natural Resource Management: Struggling to Build Large-N Databases Based on Qualitative Research. World Development. 2008;36: 176–195. 10.1016/j.worlddev.2007.02.012 - DOI
    1. Ostrom E. A diagnostic approach for going beyond panaceas Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2007;104: 15181. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Pateman C. Participation and democratic theory Cambridge University Press; 1970.
    1. Nozick R. Anarchy, State and Utopia. Basic Books; 1974.
    1. Olson M. The Rise and Decline of Nations. New Haven: Yale University Press; 1984.

Publication types