206 8: Rational Choice Th eory and Irrational Behavior
shirk responsibility. Identity-based trust is important because it reduces the like-
lihood of betrayal within organizations and increases the probability that employ-
ees will seek to prevent organizational crises (Darley 2004). In short, subordinates
respond favorably to leaders who exhibit trustworthiness (see Carnevale 1995;
Ruscio 1997). Th is fi ts well with other scholarly research indicating that people
are more likely to comply with a leader’s requests if they perceive the leader to be
trustworthy and the leader’s motivations to be neutral (Tyler 2001, 1990; Tyler
and DeGoey 1996).
Th e extension of rational choice into the realm of organizational behavior has
thus created a long-running controversy within public administration over the
motivations and explanations of bureaucratic behavior. In such advocates as Ni-
skanen, rational choice developed into one of the most rigorous and theoretically
elegant models applied to bureaucracy. It off ers public administration a strong
deductive basis for building general models of bureaucratic behavior that, at least
internally, are logically consistent and produce a wide variety of empirically test-
able hypotheses. Th e critics of rational choice argue that its starting assumptions
are too narrow and unreasonably downplay the possibility that bureaucrats might
seek to maximize the public interest, professional or ethical norms, or a variety of
group-based motivations that threaten methodological individualism. From this
perspective, the analogy of monopoly producers and monopsonist buyers prop-
ping up the supply of public services shrinks to a metaphor that caricatures rather
than characterizes public life.
Th e Niskanen model’s emphasis on individual self-interest is not without
merit; it is just that the defi nition of utility requires revision. For example, in in-
stances of information asymmetry, as is oft en the case with bureaucrats and cli-
ents, the tendency to appear fair and unselfi sh dominates the tendency to engage
in actual fair behavior (Smith 2006). Th is tendency, however, can actually lead
to suboptimal behavior in that decisionmakers are willing to incur signifi cant
costs in order to appear fair. Even though in the early 1990s the empirical re-
cord seemed to declare no clear winner in this debate, the momentum has clearly
shift ed to a more diverse view of bureaucratic, and human, behavior. Nonethe-
less, it is clear that work in rational choice has stimulated public administration
scholars to think about bureaucracies in diff erent ways and will continue to do so
into the foreseeable future.
Th e Self-Maximizing Citizen and the Tiebout Hypothesis
Although rational choice has had a considerable impact on the study of bureau-
cratic behavior, its greatest theoretical and applied implications arise from its ap-
plication to citizens rather than to bureaucrats. Bureaucrats and bureaucracies
represent a challenge to rational choice theory in that the market analogy some-
times seems forced. In such works as those of Tullock, Downs, and Niskanen,
public servants have no clear, consistent role as “buyer” or “seller,” and what is