Th e Self-Maximizing Citizen and the Tiebout Hypothesis 209
of fi ft een studies seeking to assess the impact of vertical and horizontal fragmen-
tation, Boyne (46–47) fi nds six of twenty-three measures of fragmentation clearly
associated with lower spending, four with higher spending, with the rest report-
ing insignifi cant or unstable results based on level of analysis and form of mea-
surement. At the macrolevel, Tiebout’s work stimulated a good deal of empirical
research that cumulatively neither confi rmed nor rejected its key hypothesis.
Given the ambiguity of the empirical research at the macrolevel, advocates
and critics of the Tiebout hypothesis in the 1990s began to pay serious attention
to the foundations of the theory at the microlevel. To make his model work,
Tiebout was required to make several assumptions about individual actors that
went above rational utility maximization. First, Tiebout assumed that citizens
are perfectly mobile, meaning they can easily move from community to commu-
nity. Second, the model requires citizens to be highly informed about tax- service
packages across several jurisdictions. Tiebout did not seriously propose that
these conditions existed in reality, but he adopted them as necessary simplifying
assumptions to make the model tractable. Th e more realistic microlevel expecta-
tions implied by the Tiebout model are that citizens in fragmented government
settings will be more informed about public services than those in centralized
government settings; will be more likely to exit if they are dissatisfi ed with those
services; and, given that they can make choices about tax-service packages, will
be more satisfi ed with the services they do receive.
Th ese propositions were given their most thorough empirical examina-
tion in a study by David Lowery, William Lyons, and Ruth Hoogland DeHoog
(1992), who used a survey based on matched samples of residents in polycentric
and monocentric metropolitan settings. For the most part, their fi ndings fl atly
contradicted the assumptions inherent in the Tiebout model. People in poly-
centric settings were not particularly well informed; in fact, most people in frag-
mented regions seemed to have only a vague idea of what government provided
what service to them. Instead, “the residents in our consolidated-government
sites were far better informed about their local government services than their
fragmented-government counterparts” (104). Th ere was no discernible diff erence
in levels of satisfaction with public services between residents in consolidated and
residents in fragmented government settings. Th ere was some limited evidence
that residents in fragmented settings were more likely to be mobile than those in
consolidated settings. In all settings, however, the probability of moving was very
low—an average of 2.66 percent in fragmented areas, and 1.32 percent in areas
served by consolidated government. Lowery, Lyons, and DeHoog (99–114) were
skeptical that such limited mobility was enough to create the competitive pres-
sures envisioned by the Tiebout model.
In an eff ort to resurrect the microfoundations of the Tiebout model, Paul
Teske et al. (1993) posited that a market for public services could be created by a
few mobile, well-informed citizens. Th e markets for private goods, such as auto-
mobiles and soda, aft er all, do not require that all consumers of these products be