Against a voiceless world: Albert O. Hirschman’s political economics as an alternative to public choice

Abstract

This article proposes to analyze the contributions of Albert Hirschman to political economy. Although he was explicitly affiliated to any school of thought, Hirschman worked with both economics and political science to understand questions such as ‘why do people vote and participate in politics?’. He was disappointed with what mainstream economics could provide and elaborated the Exit-Voice-Loyalty (EVL) framework, to understand mechanisms of action in politics and the economy. His EVL framework has been widely read, but it did not develop a paradigm around it and was ignored by economists due to its lack of formal models. Hirschman went on to work on the political economy of citizenship in his works (Hirschman, 1977, [1982] 2002, 1991), in order to provide answers to questions of political economy away from rational choice theory, which he considered harmful.