Is exit beneficial to democracy? To be more specific, does giving citizens the opportunity to leave a political group, public good, or the state itself strengthen the ideals, practices, or bureaucratic efficiency of democracy? Some democratic theorist, such as Mark E. Warren (“Voting With Your Feet: Exit-Based Empowerment in Democratic Theory,” American Political Science Review 105, [November 2011]: 683–701) and Chandran Kukathas (“Exit, Freedom and Gender,” in Dagmar Borchers and Annamari Vitikainen, eds., On Exit: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Right of Exit in Liberal Multicultural Societies, 2012), tend to answer in the affirmative, emphasizing that exit options underscore the values of empowerment, freedom of association, individual autonomy, and political accountability. Others, such as Sigal Ben-Porath (“Exit Rights and Entrance Paths: Accommodating Cultural Diversity in a Liberal Democracy,” Perspectives on Politics 8 [November 2010]: 1021–33) and Anne Phillips (Multiculturalism Without Culture, 2007), are more critical, pointing out that exit is not a viable option for those with a strong normative attachment to the political group and that the most vulnerable in democracies often need entrance paths as well as exits.

Exits, Voices and Social Investment is a terrific addition to this debate because it brings in much needed data. The book’s authors, Keith Dowding and Peter John, conclude in a very qualified way that exit can make democracies more efficient in their delivery of social services to their citizenry. Dowding and John reach this conclusion through an economic approach to exit that focuses on the costs and benefits of using exit or voice as a response to a deterioration of the quality of a product or service. Thus, their book brings attention to the ways in which exit and voice function in the day-to-day economic decision making of citizens who are weighing the costs and benefits of their options concerning doctors, schools, trash collection, public transportation, and so on.

Dowding and John have two goals. First, they aim to modify the theoretical model supplied by Albert O. Hirschman’s (1970) Exit, Voice, and Loyalty by illuminating additional modes of exit and voice. Thus, their use of plurals in the book’s title is deliberate. In the first three chapters, they argue that voice has two basic forms: individual voice (IV) and collective voice (CV). The latter category can be further divided into collective voice vote (CVV) and collective voice participation (CVP). The authors also separate exit into three categories: geographical exit (or Tiebout exit); private exit, which denotes moving from public sector services to the private sector; and internal exit, which entails exiting from one public provider to another. Not to neglect Hirschman’s third term, “loyalty,” Dowding and John argue that loyalty is properly understood as “a form of social investment in a community or a way of life” and should be associated with standard measures of social capital (p. 133). With this new definition, they are able to quantify loyalty and, as important, propose a connection between the social capital literature and the exit literature. While it is too soon to tell if this connection will be fruitful to both literatures, it is provocative and worthy of further exploration.

Second, Dowding and John test their modified model with survey data on public services in the United Kingdom from 2005 to 2009. The discussion of this material occurs in the final two chapters of the book and the conclusion. In an appendix, the authors provide the survey instrument, which is focused on health, education, and local government. Some of their conclusions will sound familiar: Exit and voice are not always rivals (p. 134), the use of voice is connected to satisfaction (p. 135), and those who have used voice and are satisfied are less likely to exit in the future (p. 135). Others are new and informative: 27% of respondents were “locked in” to health and education services, meaning that they were unable to exit because of the expense of exit. Respondents who feel locked in have a greater propensity to use voice than those who do not. “This is strong evidence,” they conclude, “that increasing exit options will reduce voice” (p. 141).

So what does this all mean on the question of whether exit is beneficial for democracy? Dowding and John conclude that while exit does contribute to the bureaucratic efficiency of local government, it carries a toll as well. They point out that the expansion of choice may exclude citizens, some of whom might be “the most valued” (p. 138). Choice “can be stressful” and “it does not come free” (pp. 138, 139). And, thinking of the 27% who lack exit, the authors state that “all forms of exit are less costly for the better off and the better off also [use] voice more. To increase exit will be at the expense of voice, and that will be at the expense of the poorest and most vulnerable people in society” (p. 141).

One question worth further discussion is how much an economic approach to the workaday world of local bureaucratic decision making reveals about exit and voice generally. Dowding and John argue that their theoretical conclusions are generalizable to state policy, party politics, protest, and migration (p. 130). Here the book appears to overreach. Dissidents who have emigrated from China to the West, for instance, have argued that their voice has increased with exit, particularly in the age of social media. Freed of censorship and fear, Chinese dissidents like Chen Guangcheng and Wang Dan now speak openly to tens of thousands of followers via the Internet. The same might be said of Edward Snowden, whose exit from the United States increased his political voice, not lessened it. It is not clear, moreover, what Dowding and John’s terms IV, CV, CVV, and CVP mean in nondemocratic contexts. Still other examples seem to defy a cost–benefit approach altogether. There are spectacularly inefficient exits, like, for instance, those individuals who attempt to opt out of local social services altogether by “living off the grid” or establishing eco-topias. Outside of the world British bureaucracy, a number of empirical cases raise intriguing questions for Dowding and John. One hopes that they will take these on in future work on exit.