Penalty and Punishment: Designing Effective Sanctions for Freeriders Behaviour on Early Modern Dutch Commons

Abstract

"In this paper we will explore the use of sanctioning in a number of very-long-lived commons in the Netherlands. European history provides us with examples of institutions for collective action that have managed to survive literally centuries. The longevity of the cases we study varies from 695 to 236 years. The archival sources allow us to retrieve who the commoners were (access rules), how the use of their common resources was regulated (use rules), how access and use were managed (management rules) and how the governance of the institution as a whole was arranged (governance rules). Moreover, we can include in our analyses not only the rules as such, but also analyse the type and level of the sanctions that were used to threaten and punish those who did not follow those rules. The data we have collected allow us to approach the above mentioned issues related to sanctioning in a different way. We consider the total body of rules that each of the commons we use as case-studies as the total effort the commoners spent designing the regulation of their institution. We assume that commoners wanted to keep this effort as small as possible. This approach is used to find out which aspects (access, use, management, governance) the commoners found most important to regulate, and as well, to sanction and we relate this effort to the longevity of the case-studies."