Exit and Voice as Forms of Power

If you want others to do as you wish, you can ask them, or threaten them in some way. In certain circumstances, a threat to walk away can make asking someone more likely to succeed. Albert Hirschman made this point well in his famous book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970). The basic idea is quite simple: people or organizations have two main responses to the decline in the quality of a product. They may voice, such as complain, or exit by buying another company's product. This insight extends to a variety of situations where people became dissatisfied, such as consumers of public services, members of political parties, or as employees, and in each situation people use the voice and exit options open to them. Hirschman did not just describe these actions; he argued that they might be rival options, or complementary ones. People might trade off voice and exit; if exit is easy and cheap, then people tend to voice less when they have an exit option. The threat of losing customers helps keep organizations such as business firms on their toes; losing customers affects their profit line. In that sense, the market power of consumers is their exit strategy, and the individual power of a consumer is the threat of exit. A trade union gains power of voice in negotiating with management with the threat of pulling workers out of their jobs. But entities other than firms in a competitive market might be more sanguine about the possibility of people exiting. An authoritarian regime might be happy to allow citizens to leave rather than give them a voice.

In that sense, the salience of exit and voice may give more power to those who are already not responsive and who do not like competition. Individuals who leave are not exercising power because their exit shows they have failed to get a response from their target. Only the threat of exit is a power resource, and it only works if the target cares about the exit of the person.

There are many situations where individuals can trade off exit-voice to their advantage and wield power. For one, they can use their potential for exit to make their voices heard. Discontented employees know about this weapon very well: even hinting they might leave their job can be an easy way to get better terms and conditions and to avoid the costs of leaving. Sometimes the possibility of exit means that the individual can voice more strongly, in what is called “noisy exit.” Critics of authoritarian regimes, such as of the former German Democratic Republic, can protest more effectively if they know they can leave. Alternatively, consumers or citizens are reluctant to exit because they have loyalty, so they voice with added passion. Loyalists might voice even more strongly when others are leaving because they can point to the destructive effects of exit. And those on their way out can give a signal to the rest left behind. So even though voice weakens in the face of exit, the threat of exit can strengthen voice in some circumstances. The key insight is that the ingenuity people display in communicating their options to the powerful allows them to increase their influence.

...