Rational Choice as the New Orthodoxy 215
(1962, 24). Given such a theoretical connection, Ostrom argued that rebuilding the
intellectual enterprise of public administration on rational choice foundations was
compatible with the democratic principles articulated in the Constitution.
Critics of the Ostrom perspective not only reject rational choice as the ba-
sis for a normative democratic theory of administration but also argue that its
underlying principles lead to fundamentally undemocratic processes and out-
comes. Indeed, some argue that rational choice has created rather than solved
an intellectual crisis, one considerably more severe than the lack of a central
disciplinary paradigm alluded to by Ostrom. M. Shamsul Haque (1996) argues
that the promarket values unavoidably embedded in rational choice theory
threaten the credibility and the very existence of public administration as an
independent scholarly discipline.
Haque further argues that the movement to introduce market mechanisms
into the public administration has advanced by denigrating the performance of
the public sector and extolling the excellence of private enterprise. Th e negative
image of the public service threatens its legitimacy in the popular mind and cre-
ates the incentive to think of public administration as a slightly modifi ed branch
of business administration. Th e problem with this, Haque suggests, is that the
public and private sectors are diff erent and, at least in democratic systems, oper-
ate on diff erent principles. What gets lost when viewing the public sector through
the lens of rational choice is that market values and democratic values are not just
diff erent but probably incompatible. For example, markets may effi ciently dis-
tribute goods and services, but they do not distribute them equitably, and markets
may strive to connect supply to demand, even if the good or service is patently
off ensive to democratic ideals.
Consider education, a public service about which rational choice arguments
have spread from academic matters to policy debates in the forms of propos-
als for vouchers, charters, and other marketlike mechanisms. One of the earliest
calls for a system of school choice, that is, to create a competitive market within
public education, was by southern whites in the wake of the Brown v. Board of
Education desegregation orders. Going unmet was the demand for racial segre-
gation, and the creation of a market for public education was seen as a way to
persuade schools to pay less attention to external political institutions and more
to local consumers. Most accept that a market for public education services could
produce pockets of excellence and higher levels of consumer satisfaction among
“marginal consumers,” but widespread disagreement remains about whether
markets will equitably distribute those benefi ts to everyone or concentrate them
in the hands of a socio economically advantaged few (Henig 1994). Such outcomes
may represent the technical advantages of the market in effi ciency, but contradict
the egalitarian values of democracy. In Madisonian terms, markets may unleash
rather than constrain the corrosive power of factions.
Haque (1996) argues that the contradictions between markets and democ-
racy have important implications for the practice as well as the study of public