The Ostroms’ sustained Public Choice offensive is recognized as such over years, in a
set of works reviewing and introducing the field, although the key paradigmatic challenge
they advanced is not always noted. For instance, in Lynn and Wildawsky’s (1990), Public
Administration—The State of the Discipline, Ostromian Public Choice is used as the
typical example of approach using objectivist assumptions and taking a political and
structural perspective. (As such, it is occupying the fourth quadrant in a two-axes matrix,
subjective–objective and political–organizational). The authors refer to Thiebout’s theory
to explain that Public Choice ‘‘emphasis on a consumer perspective in decision making on
the supply of services’’ (Ibid, p. 233); comment rather inaccurately that ‘‘Ostrom’s
Democratic Administration sees bureaucracy as an absolute evil’’ (Ibid, p. 146), and
highlight a remark the Ostroms’ influence on public budgeting analysis. In this respect,
they note, Public Choice ‘‘provides a clearly demarcated theoretical reference point and
philosophical criterion against which both budgets processes and policies may be set’’
while it ‘‘on the normative level sets up standards for design of systems of fiscal decision
making, legitimizing decentralization and the decoupling of service provision and service
delivery’’ (Lynn and Wildawsky 1990, p. 246).