Bureaucrats as Public Policy-Makers and Their Self-Interests

Abstract

That public bureaucrats, like most other people, might pursue their private interests as voters, job applicants and union members is hardly surprising. It is the postulate that bureaucrats' self-interested behavior penetrates their role as public decision-makers that represents a challenge, empirical-theoretically as well as normatively. To assess the assumption that bureaucrats' self-interests affect bureaucrats' decisions in their capacity as officials (the self-interest hypothesis), two main points are made. First, the probability that self-interests are conceived and made operational in different issue areas is considered. Second, it is argued that the explanatory power of bureaucrats' self-interests has to depend on characteristics of the self-interest phenomenon itself, for instance whether it is dealt with as a variable or a constant. Moreover, it has to depend on the relative importance of other explanations.