204 8: Rational Choice Th eory and Irrational Behavior
bureaucracies act altruistically in pursuit of the public interest as the 2014 US
Senate report on CIA interrogation tactics clearly demonstrates. Nonetheless,
it does suggests more constraints on the self-interested bureaucrat than are ac-
counted for by rational choice theory.
Some of these constraints may even be willingly imposed by the individual.
As various researchers have concluded, bureaucrats routinely espouse a com-
mitment to the public interest. If Niskanen is correct, these worthy motives will
cumulatively account for little because no one bureaucrat has the necessary in-
formation to divine the public interest. Perhaps so, but when it comes to infor-
mation, bureaucrats are better equipped to create a reasonable approximation of
the public interest and act in its pursuit than are most other social actors. Most
career administrators at the Environmental Protection Agency are committed
to environmental protection, and their counterparts in the Defense Department
are committed to national defense. Such bureaucrats oft en evidence a willingness
to shift policies and programs in pursuit of these goals, even if the benefi ts to
themselves or their agency are hard to discern. For example, the senior career
administrators in at least one major federal agency (the Civil Aeronautics Board)
successfully worked to put their organization out of business (Meier 1994, 228).
Th ese sorts of fi ndings do not necessarily disconfi rm rational choice theory’s ex-
planation of bureaucratic behavior, but they do raise questions about the funda-
mental assumptions that supply the framework’s explanatory power.
James L. Perry’s seminal work (Perry, Mesch, and Paarlberg 2006) on public
service motivation is also instructive here. Most notably for our purposes, the link
between fi nancial incentives and the motivations and behaviors of public-sector
employees is more nuanced than would be predicted by a strict model of pure
rationality. Variables relating to participation in organizational decisionmaking,
the amount and quality of employee feedback, and the degree to which the job
is challenging all aff ect public-sector employee motivations (Perry, Mesch, and
Paarlberg 2006; Perry 2000). Rather than fi xed preferences as assumed by strict
rationality, the institutional environment can also shape individual preferences.
More hierarchical organizations with less red tape can increase the level of pub-
lic service motivation reported by employees (Moynihan and Pandey 2007). Ni-
skanen’s self-interested bureaucrat engages in predictable behavioral patterns;
she will maximize salary when possible, shirk work in the absence of monitoring,
and reliably respond in the face of fi nancial incentives. Recent empirical evidence
suggests that, even though bureaucrats are predictable, their behavior is not ratio-
nal in the neoclassical economic sense.
Trust and the Irrational Bureaucrat
Despite the ordered logic of rational choice theory as a model for explaining in-
effi ciency in public organizations, recent work in organizational psychology sug-
gests the basic assumptions of such a model are fl awed. Bureaucrats may seek to