may strive to connect supply to demand, even if the good or service is patently
offensive 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 proposals
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 segregation, 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 benefits to everyone or concentrate them in the hands of a socio -economically advantaged few (Henig ). Such outcomes may represent the
technical advantages of the market in efficiency, but contradict the egalitarian values of democracy. In Madisonian terms, markets may unleash rather than constrain the corrosive power of factions.
Haque () argues that the contradictions between markets and democracy
have important implications for the practice as well as the study of public administration. The basic ethics of public service as established by the American Society
of Public Administrators emphasize norms such as legality, responsibility, accountability, commitment, responsiveness, equality, and public disclosure (Mertins and
Hennigan ). As rational choice becomes the epistemological standard in public administration courses, Haque (, ) suggests, it has to redefine “public”
in market terms if it is to preserve its internal theoretical consistency. As the concept of “public” atrophies under the paradigmatic insistence of rational choice,
students, teachers, and scholars of public administration are left with an identity
crisis. The likely result is that public administration morphs into business administration, where efficiency and productivity are prized and equity and representativeness are relegated to secondary concerns. This, Haque suggests, is not a concept
of administration that is compatible with the democratic theorizing of Madison
or Hamilton.
Other critics also argue that rational choice’s focus on methodological individualism has blinded it to the core purpose of public administration. Ronald Moe
and Robert Gilmore () argue that from the standpoint of representative
democracy, the mission of any public bureaucracy has to be top-down, not bottom-up. A public agency is ultimately responsible to the representative legislature
and the law that authorizes its existence, its purpose, and its mission. The job of
a public agency is not to divine the preferences of its clientele and then satisfy