Th e Self-Maximizing Citizen and the Tiebout Hypothesis 211
is typical. Lowery et al. noted that school districts on Long Island hold annual
referendums on school spending, an unusual budgetary process that provides
citizens with a cue to education taxing and spending issues that is not present
in most districts. If more than 70 percent of the high-income movers were un-
informed on a minimal measure of such a high-profi le local service, the levels of
information about, say, police services and sanitation were likely to be minuscule.
Although stopping short of arguing that the Teske model was wrong, Lowery and
his colleagues argue that the empirical evidence supporting it is very weak.
Although it is diffi cult to take anything defi nitive from the empirical re-
search on market mechanisms on public services, these studies do bring into
sharp relief the central disagreements over the Tiebout model. Advocates of
rational choice argue that, if constructed with care, something approaching a
competitive market for public services can be created that will produce benefi ts
for all. Th e competitive pressures of the market can provide public agencies
with the incentives to be responsive to consumer-citizen preferences and to
become effi cient producers of public goods. Opponents of rational choice argue
that faith in markets is naïve and ignores the reality that competition produces
losers as well as winners. Such losses are acceptable in the private sector, but
when, say, a school goes out of business, the losers are not just the producers
but the consumers, and what is lost is not just a consumption opportunity but
a part of the common weal. Regardless of the theoretical payoff s to deregulat-
ing the public sector, critics of rational choice argue that in reality there are
too few informed consumers to drive a competitive market for public services.
Th e likely result of trying to create such a market is not more effi ciency but
less equality. Th e socioeconomically advantaged are simply better positioned in
such markets to defend their dominant social position, an outcome at odds with
the egalitarian values of democratic government.
While academics debate the pros and cons of the Tiebout model, its core argu-
ments have entered mainstream political debates and helped drive numerous re-
forms in public agencies. Th e 1990s movement to “reinvent” government through
decentralizing authority and encouraging competition, for example, popularized
the key arguments underlying Tiebout’s model and sparked a raft of organiza-
tional reform in the public sector (see Osborne and Gaebler 1992). School vouch-
ers, Total Quality Management, privatization, and contracting out—many of the
most controversial reforms attempted in the public sector since the early 1990s—
spring from the arguments fi rst formally articulated by Tiebout. Whether these
reforms will expose the weakness or the wisdom of orthodox perspectives in pub-
lic administration scholarship is still an open question.
Perhaps the most comprehensive and useful revision to the Tiebout model,
and rational choice more generally, comes from the work of Nobel Laureate Eli-
nor Ostrom. Ostrom and her colleagues have advanced a theoretical paradigm
in which cooperation can be achieved in the absence of an external authority or
explicitly stated rules and sanctions. Th e Hobbesian solution to a social dilemma