Albert Hirschman's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty

Anonymous

Tue, 01/08/2013 - 04:51

Book Reviews

In memory of Albert O.Hirschman, an important economist and
political scientist who died last month, I want to apply some of the
ideas from his most famous book, <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=vYO6sDvjvcgC&printsec=frontcover&dq=ex…; target="”_blank”">Exit, Voice, and Loyalty</a> (1970), to local government ethics (<a href="http://www.cityethics.org/node/779" target="”_blank”">back in 2009</a>, I
pulled out a few thought-provoking passages from his 1983 book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Shifting-Involvements-Interest-Historical-Economi…; target="”_blank”">Shifting Involvements: Private Interest
and Public Action</a>). 
 
Of the three concepts in the title of Hirschman's book, loyalty is
the one most often encountered in government ethics. Loyalty in a
government organization is one of the primary causes of ethical
misconduct, and one of the most serious obstacles to an organization
instituting an ethics program that will successfully prevent ethical
misconduct and deal with it effectively when it occurs.

Voice 
Voice is extremely important to the democratic values that underlie
government ethics. Voice is the way individuals and groups of
individuals (including government employees and officials) let their
dissatisfaction with government policies and misconduct be known.
Voice is the principal secondary goal of government ethics. The
primary goal is to maintain the public's trust in government. But
public trust is not important simply in its own right. It is also
important because, without public trust, citizens give up voicing
their concerns through participation in government, either
informally through public comments, letters to the editor, and
blogs, or formally through sitting on boards and commissions,
running for office, participating in campaigns, or voting. 
 
Exit 
When a citizen, or an
official or employee, feels she is wasting her time voicing her concerns, the
principal alternative (short of overthrow) is exit. But it's not
the ordinary exit, for example, of a consumer who finds the quality
of a company's products poor and, therefore, buys from another
company. How many people ever leave their city or county due to a
poor government ethics environment? And, unless exiting caught on
and led to house prices plummeting, who would care? In colonial
days, and even in the early days of the new nation, groups of people
did protest by picking up and founding another town, first in the
east and later in the west. But this almost never happens anymore. 
 
The way citizens exit is to give up their voice. They stop going to
public meetings, choose not to join party committees or serve on
government boards, and don't even bother to vote or follow the news
about their local governments. 
 
Actual exit is a solution for those who are part of a government
organization. However, even the resignation of officials and
employees, if it is not accompanied by a powerful use of their
voices ("voice after exit"), has little or no effect on a poor
ethics environment. It is hard to know whether one's voice will be
more effective inside or outside an organization. Sadly, as
Hirschman recognized, most officials, when they leave office, say
they are doing it for private purposes, giving up their voice in
addition to exiting. 
 
Exit and Voice 
In fact, even exit and protest together often has little effect. <a href="http://www.cityethics.org/node/608" target="”_blank”">Take Jackson County, KS</a>
(home of Kansas City). When in 2009 most of its ethics commission
resigned in protest at county legislators exempting themselves from
its jurisdiction, this had little effect. <a href="http://www.cityethics.org/content/ec-independence-and-initiative-kentuc…; target="”_blank”">Or consider Kentucky</a>. When most of its state legislative ethics
commission, and the executive director, resigned in protest in 1996,
the program simply continued, with a new, highly respected executive
director, who remains loyal to the program. 
 
Why is exit, even combined with voice, often done in vain? Hirschman
pointed out that, "in the political realm ... exit has often been
branded as criminal, for it has been labeled desertion,
defection, and treason." And in our culture, we don't respect and listen
to people who quit. We feel that people should continue to fight,
even that they owe this to the community that elected them or for
whom they worked. 
 
Another problem is that exit works best when one can exit to a rival
organization. But a local government has no rival, except perhaps
city vs. county. But they usually provide different services,
complement rather than compete. Exiting to work for another
government doesn't matter to anyone. Leaving one party for the other
(or another) is another form of exit, but most local
governments are either nonpartisan or essentially one-party. In any
event, to the public, changing parties is not a form of exit at all;
it's voicing a protest or going with the party that you feel will
take power, that is, a selfish choice. 
 
Loyalty 
For those in government, there is an alternative to exit or
voice: acquiescence, being co-pted, giving up your voice. This
limbo is what many government officials and employees choose. It
usually involves a reasonable belief that the probability of
influencing decisions is minimal and that the cost of voicing one's
concerns is high. 
 
This is not what most of us think of as loyalty, but the effect is
the same. After all, it does consist of going along to remain part
of the gang, or to keep one's position or authority. This common way
to deal with a poor ethics environment is an internalization of the
penalty an organization places on voice and, sometimes, exit. It is
because this sort of internalization is so common that high-level
government officials so rarely have to actually penalize any of
their colleagues or subordinates, and can therefore focus on their
opponents, whose allegations against them they can reject as
"partisan" or "political." 
 
Hirschman felt that loyalty can be good for voice, because it makes
exit not so easy a choice. If one is stuck in an organization, and
the organization is deteriorating, a loyal member of the
organization has a greater reason to use his voice than someone who
is not loyal and, therefore, can simply leave. 
 
In theory, this is reasonable, and it does happen sometimes that
individuals stay in office in the belief that their local government
would get even worse if they left. But many of these individuals are
fooling themselves (Hirschman wrote, "Usually this sort of reasoning
is an ex-post ... justification of opportunism," but that there are
times when it serves an important purpose, that is, when an official
speaks out at the decisive moment). And the worse things get, the
stronger one's feeling is that one is indispensable, that exiting
will do more harm than staying put. 
 
One of the most damaging roles an official can play, Hirschman
noted, is "official dissenter," a member of the team who is
effectively assigned the job of disagreeing with the majority view.
This takes away the official's greatest weapon: the threat to
resign under protest and, thereby, make public what the government
is trying to keep under wraps. An official dissenter agrees to keep
the process secret, to play by the rules even if she opposes them. 
 
When a local government's ethics environment is deteriorating,
loyalty tends to consist of silence rather than voice. One problem
is that most people's loyalty is to individuals rather than to the
organization as a whole. This sort of loyalty allows an individual
to remain silent when high-level officials put their personal
interests ahead of the public interest, which is, in theory, the
same as the organization's interest. 
 
Hirschman did recognize this problem. He wrote that "it is possible
for loyalty to overshoot the mark and thus to produce an exit-voice
mix in which the exit option is unduly neglected. … It must be
realized that loyalty-promoting institutions and devices are not
only uninterested in stimulating voice at the expense of exit:
indeed they are often meant to repress voice alongside exit.
… their short-run interest is to entrench themselves and to enhance
their freedom to act as they wish, unmolested as far as possible by
either desertions or complaints of members." 
 
Hirschman also recognized that organization members "may have a
considerable stake in self-deception, that is, in fighting the
realization that the organization he belongs to ... [is]
deteriorating." 
 
On-and-Off Voice 
Hirschman pointed out that, for citizens, it is not necessarily an
either-or situation. Citizens do not have to be only active or
inactive in local politics. In other words, just because they exit
from participation doesn't mean they give up their voice. In fact,
he argued, "a mixture of alert and inert citizens, or even an
alternation of involvement and withdrawal, may actually serve
democracy better than either total, permanent activism or total
apathy." One reason for this is that "the ordinary failure, on the
part of most citizens, to use their potential political resources to
the full makes it possible for them to react with unexpected
vigor—by using normally unused reserves of political power and
influence—whenever their vital interests are directly threatened." 
 
This may work with respect to national politics, but vital local
interests are usually limited to taxes, basic services, and
development issues. And when you stop participating in local
government, it's hard to know what's going on. It doesn't receive
the coverage, and local governments rarely have the transparency of
national government. 
 
Local government ethics is not a vital interest for anyone but good
government groups, who usually have small memberships and, even
among members, a much smaller core of activists who are usually
permanent activists. Rarely do individuals go in and out of
participation in ethics-related matters. 
 
Solutions 
So where does one go with all these ideas? Hirschman pointed out one
solution on page 42 of his book:<blockquote>

[O]nce voice is recognized as a mechanism with considerable
usefulness for maintaining performance, institutions can be designed
in such a way that the cost of individual and collective action
would be decreased. Or, in some situations, the rewards for
successful action might be increased for those who had initiated it.
Often it is possible to create entirely new channels of
communication...</blockquote>

In other words, once a local government acknowledges how damaging
the exit of citizens is and how difficult the exit of officials and
employees, it can focus on how to improve voice. It can make room
for longer and more frequent public hearings and public comment
periods, and make those hearings and periods available to the public
on the community TV station and online. It can go out of its way to
attract unconnected citizens to sit on its boards and commissions and, with
respect to oversight boards, including ethics commissions, to have
members selected not by government officials subject to their
jurisdiction (can anyone imagine a police department citizen
oversight board selected by the police chief?), but rather by
community organizations. It can set up a hotline to make it easier
for officials and employees, as well as citizens, to voice their
concerns about ethical misconduct via anonymous complaints. And it
can reward those who notify the ethics commission of ethics
violations by recognizing them publicly (if they want this
recognition), by a strong whistleblower provision, and by paying
legal fees and other costs involved in filing complaints or dealing
with retaliatory suits filed by angry officials. 
 
This list of ways to increase voice and reward those who exercise it
to the community's benefit include some of the reforms that
high-level officials most often find objectionable. For
example, according to <a href="http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/17386568-418/city-council-may-rebel-…; target="”_blank”">a
Chicago Sun-Times article this week</a>, members of Chicago's
council have expressed strong opposition to allowing the council's
inspector general to investigate anonymous complaints. They are
following their member on the ethics task force, who objected in his
dissent to the task force's recommendation of allowing anonymous
complaints that such a policy would “release a torrent of frivolous
and spurious charges." 
 
Another way to describe the effect of such a policy is that it would
allow citizens, as well as officials and employees who have a great
deal to lose by going public with information only they know, to
voice their concerns. Yes, more charges would be made,
and some of them would be false and many irrelevant to government ethics, but those false and irrelevant charges would be
formally dismissed. Otherwise, the same charges would be made in
newspapers and blogs, and there would be no formal process to
dismiss them. They would never go past he-said-she-said. That is
much more harmful to the public trust than a formal program in which
an independent ethics commission dismisses complaints and sets the
record straight. 
 
Hirschman did not apply his ideas to government ethics, but he did apply them to other
aspects of local government. Most interesting is how he applied his
concept of voice and exit to public education. He argued that alternatives (now
private, parochial, and charter schools, as well as home schooling)
are forms of exit from the public education system, and they damage
that system by removing the voices of those "who would be most
motivated and determined to put up a fight against the
deterioration" if they couldn't exit the system. 
 
You don't have to go to any trouble to exit from a government ethics
program. In fact, you don't even have to speak out in favor of
creating one, or against destroying one. That's one reason why there
are so few government ethics programs. 
 
Robert Wechsler 
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics 
 
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Albert Hirschman's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty

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