Garbage Cans and Rent Seeking 85
the just and equitable distribution of public service and life opportunities, and in
citizens’ preferences and involvement, although they sharply disagree about how.
Garbage Cans and Rent Seeking
Among the best-known elements of institutional theory is the logic of the gar-
bage can. In the garbage can one fi nds order, but this order is neither sequential
nor consequential and turns much of the rational logic of decision theory on its
head. Order may not be sequential because the relationship between means and
ends is oft en temporal; that is to say, public problems, public institutions, and
opportunities for choices mingle in nonlinear ways as independent, exogenous
streams fl owing through a system (Cohen, March, and Olsen 1972; March and
Olsen 1989; Weick 1979). Public problems in the garbage can seek solutions; at
the same time, public institutions may be attracted to particular problems. Prob-
lems, solutions, and decisionmakers are temporal phenomena simultaneously
available and can form a temporal order. “A computer is not just a solution to a
problem in payroll management, discovered when needed. It is an answer actively
looking for a question. Despite the dictum that you cannot fi nd the answer until
you have formulated the question well, you oft en do not know what the public
policy question is until you know the answer” (March and Olsen 1989, 13). In the
absence of structural constraints, simultaneity, not means-ends sequences, de-
termines the linkages between problems and solutions and between institutional
answers and questions.
Perhaps the best-known public-sector empirical application of the garbage
can is found in the work of John W. Kingdon. In Agendas, Alternatives, and Pub-
lic Policies (1995), he describes shift ing alliances, poorly understood technologies,
changing perceptions, and an unclear mix of means and ends that could only
be explained as temporal sorting, or simultaneity. Th e evident disorderliness of
institutional simultaneity suggests the inadequacy of theoretical explanations or-
dinarily used to attempt to understand institutions.
In much of the history of public administration, we have also assumed orderly
relationships between public problems and their solutions, and we have assumed
that these were means-ends consequential relationships. From the garbage can
perspective, elements of consequential arguments and rhetoric appear in insti-
tutional decision processes, but so do observable patterns of problem-solution
simultaneity. Rather than the answer to a particular public policy question, in the
garbage can an appropriate answer is most likely (March and Olsen 1995).
From this logic, it has been determined that patterns of institutional reform
and reorganization are ad hoc, guided by a kind of pragmatic simultaneity (Seid-
man 1980; Szanton 1981; Salamon 1989; Meier 1980). In a similar way, patterns
of public policymaking are patchwork (Skowronek 1982), opportunistic pragma-
tism (Johnson 1976), and “putting square pegs into round holes” (Radin 2000).
Much of the language of public policy and administration is consequential, a