200 8: Rational Choice Th eory and Irrational Behavior
institutional environment, they pay little attention to the individual incentives
that are the real source of the problem. Tullock went so far as to suggest that in
extreme situations, the external political control of bureaucracies will virtually
evaporate as bureaucrats engage in “bureaucratic free enterprise,” that is, pur-
sue their own goals rather than the public missions associated with their agen-
cies (1965, 167). Th is picture of unwieldy, self-interested agencies whose actions
increasingly became divorced from public rhetoric seemed to off er intellectual
confi rmation for negative and widespread perceptions of public bureaucracies.
Although Tullock’s arguments have proven less than tenable, instances of bureau-
cratic agencies’ going rogue do exist. As discussed in Chapter 7, the 2014 report
on CIA interrogation techniques by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
painted the picture of an agency unaccountable to anyone but the street-level
bureaucrats making day-to-day decisions about which “enhanced interrogation
techniques” to use on prisoners.
Downs’s work is only slightly more optimistic. Building from the assump-
tion of rational self-interest, Downs argued that a set of behavioral biases should
be common to all bureaucrats: (1) Like Tullock, Downs (1967, 77) argued that
bureaucrats will be motivated to distort information as it passes upward in the
hierarchy to refl ect favorably on themselves and their individual goals. (2) Bu-
reaucrats will favor policies that fi t with their own interests and goals. (3) How
bureaucrats react to directives from superiors will depend on how those direc-
tives serve the bureaucrats’ self-interest. If the directives favor individual inter-
ests, the degree of compliance will be high; if not, it will be low. (4) Individual
goals will determine the extent to which bureaucrats seek out responsibility and
also determine their risk tolerance in pursuit of responsibility and power.
Rather than concentrate on career advancement, Downs sought to accommo-
date a wider variety of individual goals in conceptualizing the motivations of the
self-interested bureaucrat, and systematically ordered these goals into a typology
of bureaucratic personalities. In Downs’s classifi cation (1967, 92), “climbers” are
bureaucrats who want to maximize their power, income, or prestige. Climbers
are likely to pursue responsibility aggressively, especially in the sense of creating
new functions for their agencies. In contrast, “conservers” are bureaucrats who
want to maximize security and convenience, and they will more likely defend
existing prerogatives and functions rather than try to invent new ones. “Zealots”
are bureaucrats motivated to pursue particular policies, even in the face of over-
whelming obstacles. Downs suggested that because zealots are unlikely to make
good administrators, they are unlikely to hold high organizational ranks. Other
categories included “advocates,” who, like zealots, aggressively pursue favored
policies but are more open to infl uence from peers and superiors, and “states-
men,” bureaucrats seeking to promote the public interest through the promotion
of broad policy goals (102).
Working from this typology, the basic assumptions of self-interest and the
likely impact from the structural characteristics found in the bureaucratic form