264 10: Conclusion: A Bright Future for Th eory?
choice theory, should improve the quality of public goods, reduce their costs, and
increase citizen satisfaction. Th is prescriptive vision has a normative cast that was
recognized and amplifi ed by rational choice scholars. Elinor Ostrom (1998) and
others argued that rational choice represented a truly democratic theory of public
administration, one that off ered a better way to realize the republican form of
government envisioned by James Madison. Ostrom’s work has also shown that
the path to more effi cient organizations may not always fl ow through the use of
market mechanisms, such as competition. Organizations, through open commu-
nication and transparency, can be self-regulating and produce optimal outcomes
(Ostrom, Gardner, and Walker 1994; Ostrom, Schroeder, and Wayne 1993).
Although the scope and impact of rational choice are hard to underestimate,
its loft y ambitions to provide a central positive and normative theoretical para-
digm for public administration remain unrealized. As a theory in the positivist
sense, rational choice is hampered by doubts about its core assumptions and the
mixed empirical confi rmation of the hypotheses generated by these assumptions.
Rational choice is deductively tied to the concepts of rational utility maximization
and methodological individualism. Th ese core assumptions provide the theory
with its parsimony and predictive capacities. If either of these is wrong or (more
likely) incomplete when applied to public-sector phenomenon, the conclusions
and prescriptions of rational choice stand on soft foundations. Th e mixed em-
pirical record of rational choice scholarship has done little to ease such concerns.
Rational choice is criticized as a normative theory because it equates market
values with democratic values, even though these clearly confl ict in specifi cs. For
example, an agency may satisfy its clientele, but in doing so it does not necessarily
serve the public interest. Public agencies are supposed to be accountable to the
collective, not to the individual, and their duty is to serve the law rather than
seek customer satisfaction. To serve the egalitarian purposes of democracy, they
cannot subordinate process to outcomes, or accountability to effi ciency (Moe and
Gilmour 1995). Critics of rational choice argue not only that it is incompatible
with fundamental democratic values but also that it is fundamentally hostile to
them.
Even though rational choice theory has clearly sought to fulfi ll all the purposes
of theory, there are clear problems regarding explanatory and predictive capac-
ity, as well as empirical warrant. As such, rational choice theory receives a low
to mixed rating across all three categories. Th e increasingly obvious inability to
describe real-world phenomena accurately also leads to a low rating for descrip-
tive capacity. Th us, the empirical record points to a strong need for a new theory
of human behavior that overcomes the increasingly clear limitations of rational
choice. Th e problem for practicing scholars is that such a theory does not yet
exist; instead, scholars are left to gather evidence piecemeal from multiple disci-
plines using multiple methodologies. Th e evidence, both theoretical and empiri-
cal, is available for the fi eld to move away from strict rational choice theory to a
more interdisciplinary and theoretically useful approach (and indeed some public