The most consequential foundational contribution of the Ostromian research program to the field of public administration is the effort to introduce the apparatus of modern “political economy” to the core of the field. The other important contributions to the theories of governance and public administration are, in one way or another, based on, or derived from, that. Following the evolution of public administration as a field, and its relationship with economics since its inception in Woodrow Wilson's effort to institutionalize the new discipline, one realizes that the Ostromian perspective was a turning point. The Ostroms pushed for a change of paradigm, as the main advocates in the field of public administration of the public choice revolution fuelled by scholars such as James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock in the 1960s.

Public administration and political economy developed as two distinctive domains and traditions. Yet, with the burst of the public choice movement in the academic arena in the 1960s, a convergence takes place. Elinor and Vincent Ostrom's contributions emerge as uniquely important in this respect because the two Bloomington scholars were the unquestionable architects of the intellectual junction point. Working in both traditions – public administration and public choice – they created an entire research program aiming at their integration (Aligica 2015; Aligica & Boettke 2009). The attempt to promote public choice as the theoretical foundations in public administration, and public administration as the applied domain of public choice is undoubtedly a major contribution of the Ostroms to both the foundational and the applied social sciences in the twentieth century.

By the beginning of the 1970s Vincent Ostrom recognized an acute “intellectual crisis of public administration”, which created the conditions for a potential new start and a novel approach. The Ostroms’ alternative was to use the new theory of public choice as the foundational theoretical framework for public administration: