216 8: Rational Choice Th eory and Irrational Behavior
administration. Th e basic ethics of public service as established by the American
Society of Public Administrators emphasize such norms as legality, responsibil-
ity, accountability, commitment, responsiveness, equality, and public disclosure
(Mertins and Hennigan 1982). As rational choice becomes the epistemological
standard in public administration courses, Haque (1996, 518) suggests, it has to
redefi ne “public” in market terms if it is to preserve its internal theoretical consis-
tency. As the concept of “public” atrophies under the paradigmatic insistence of
rational choice, students, teachers, and scholars of public administration are left
with an identity crisis. Th e likely result is that public administration morphs into
business administration, where effi ciency and productivity are prized and equity
and representativeness are relegated to secondary concerns. Th is, Haque suggests,
is not a concept of administration that is compatible with the democratic theoriz-
ing of Madison or Hamilton.
Other critics also argue that rational choice’s focus on methodological indi-
vidualism has blinded it to the core purpose of public administration. Ronald
Moe and Robert Gilmore (1995) argue that from the standpoint of representa-
tive democracy, the mission of any public bureaucracy has to be top-down, not
bottom-up. A public agency is ultimately responsible to the representative legisla-
ture and the law that authorizes its existence, its purpose, and its mission. Th e job
of a public agency is not to divine the preferences of its clientele and then satisfy
them. A public agency, in other words, is just that: public. It is not the equivalent
of a private-sector producer serving a market niche by satisfying the preferences
of a certain set of customers. A public agency’s job is to serve the collective insti-
tutions of the democratic system and, ultimately, the Constitution. An agency’s
clientele might not like some of the actions when they are responsive to such
top-down considerations, but public administration is supposed to serve the will
of the state, not the selfi sh wants of the individual. Th ere are any number of con-
ceivable instances in which an agency might serve its clientele well, but, in doing
so, harm the common good. A school in a competitive education market, for ex-
ample, may off er religious indoctrination as part of the curriculum. Parents who
fi nd this attractive can take their children, along with their tax dollars, to such
a school and be highly satisfi ed. From an individual and market perspective, all
is well—supply is effi ciently matched with demand through the mechanisms of
competition among producers and choice among consumers. From a group-level
democratic perspective, the result is less pleasing. Th e central legal justifi cation
for public schooling—to teach the imperatives of democratic citizenship—is sub-
ordinated to market demand, if not lost altogether (Rebell 1998).
Democracy is ultimately a set of guarantees about process—a person’s rights
to participate in collective decisions—not about outcomes. Th e market delivers
what the individual wants; democracy delivers what we can all agree upon and
live with. Th e two, as critics of rational choice take some pains to point out, are
not the same thing in practice or in theory (Callan 1997). For such reasons, crit-
ics argue that rational choice is a poor choice for the central paradigm of public