Exit, Voice, and Electoral Turnover | CU Experts

Much of the contemporary literature on metropolitan politics revolves around the mobility of local residents and the implications this has both for policies of local governments and for the racial composition of local populations. In this article, the authors hypothesize that resort to exit is a function of the extent to which local residents lack effective access to institutionalized forms of voice, in particular availability of opportunities for replacing elected officials viewed as unresponsive to local needs and concerns. The authors test this argument with information from a 2002 survey of residents of four of the largest metropolitan areas in the country, along with census data about their neighborhoods and data on electoral turnover in their municipal governments. The authors find evidence that intentions to leave a city are indeed conditional both on dissatisfaction with key collective goods and services (in particular local public schools and neighborhoods) and lack of effective opportunities for the replacement of locally elected public officials. The authors find evidence of racially driven motivations for exit, but the direction is inconsistent and the magnitude of the racial effect is smaller than that deriving from dissatisfaction with services where electoral turnover is low.

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