The Rational, Self-Maximizing Bureaucrat
One of the earliest and most far-reaching impacts of rational choice theory was
in explaining the actions of bureaucrats and bureaucracies. Picking up the intellectual
foundation laid by Buchanan and Tullock, several scholars extended the
rational choice framework into a model of organizational behavior that challenged
traditional scholarly perspectives on bureaucracy. The best known of these works
are Gordon Tullock’s The Politics of Bureaucracy (), Anthony Downs’s Inside
Bureaucracy (), and William Niskanen’s Bureaucracy and Representative Government
().
Following the core assumptions of rational choice theory, all these works begin
with the presumption that what bureaucracies do can be understood by viewing
bureaucrats as self-interested utility maximizers. They also borrow heavily from
the Weberian picture of a mature bureaucracy, particularly in the sense that a bureaucracy
is an organization that enjoys an information advantage over its supposed
political masters. Given these starting presumptions, Tullock, Downs, and
Niskanen presented a picture of public administrators far removed from the neutrally
competent agents of implementation that populate traditional public administration
folklore.
Tullock sought to explain what a bureaucracy would look like if bureaucrats
were self-interested utility maximizers. He argued that a rational, self-interested
bureaucrat maximizes utility through career advancement, and that advancement
in the merit-based systems of public bureaucracies often depends upon the favorable
recommendations of superiors. If this is so, Tullock reasoned, the rational
bureaucrat will seek to please superiors and put himself in as favorable a light as
possible. Thus, a rational bureaucrat will highlight information that reflects favorably
upon himself and will repress (perhaps even suppress) information that
does not. Distorting information in this way will create a host of problems.