Voting with Your (Fill in the Blank): The Effect of Exit Options on Mayoral Election Turnout

Abstract

Environments matter for politics. They supply information, incentives, and influences that mold how individuals and electorates engage in politics. However, environments are typically conceived of in a relatively narrow fashion, considering only the immediate context or jurisdiction that an individual or electorate is located within. We expand this framework, arguing that surrounding environments are also consequential by offering an important constraint: exit options. Building on Hirschman’s (1970) assertion that people can exercise exit or voice in response to organizational dissatisfaction, we argue that the quality and quantity of exit options available to the electorate act to either constrain the citizenry stimulating turnout, or enable exit at the expense of voting. We test these hypotheses with a unique dataset of turnout in mayoral elections across 496 cities between 2002-2004 incorporating not only immediate environments, but also the nature of the surrounding political environments to capture exit options. We demonstrate that these exit options influence democratic activity. Some of our findings run counter to what we would expect (and hope) from democracy in multi-government contexts: fewer and less robust exit options appear to reduce turnout. Our research demonstrates that conceiving of environments as being limited to a single domain of analysis is missing much of the story. Environments exist in layers. Accounting only for the most central layer omits the interdependence between places, and the influences they exert.

Keywords: Voter Turnout, Urban Politics, Political Behavior, Spatial Methods