‘Exit, Voice, and Loyalty’ Revisited: The Strategic Production and Consumption of Public and Private Goods

In his recent review of Albert O. Hirschman's book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty Brian Barry suggested that the next step was ‘to look more systematically at ways in which exit and voice can be related, and to try and bring all the variables relevant to each kind of relationship into an explicit theoretical structure.’ This paper is an attempt to move in this direction by locating the concepts involved unequivocally within the so-called ‘economic’ or ‘rational choice’ paradigm. It is hoped that any resulting loss of richness will be more than compensated for by an increase in the internal consistency of the argument. It will be demonstrated that most of the logic of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty rests on ‘economic’ assumptions – Barry has already shown that where Hirschman departs from these his argument is at its weakest – and that making this reliance fully explicit not only increases the rigor of the approach but reorients some of the conclusions.