CIVIC NEGLECT
And what of those who neither place a high value on their political influence nor glow with civic pride? If exit is daunting to this group of citizens, do they then turn to voice? Perhaps some idle cranks fall into that category, but many more citizens use neither exit nor voice. A subset of these know that their interests are not well represented, and another subset have not even made that initial calculation. It may come as a surprise, but Hirschman's original model had nothing to say about this residual group of individuals who have opportunities for exit and voice but do not use them. One group of scholars using the model to study urban politics quickly discovered this group of citizens. In their view, failure to respond when perceiving political problems amounts to system neglect. This term underscores the fact that the use of neither exit nor voice is still a behavioral choice—the choice to neglect the system through nonresponse.[54]
Civic neglect is easy to recognize. When neglect becomes a prevalent response mode, one can expect large percentages of a public to stop voting altogether. These nonvoters are unlikely to follow politics closely. They skip political sections of the newspaper, avoid political television programming, and even eschew policy- or campaign-oriented political conversation. When asked about their views, citizens neglecting
When open and egalitarian political institutions are in place, civic neglect can still become widespread if citizens lack the sense of efficacy and motivation necessary to use those institutions effectively. Even when the public is brimming with confldence and civic responsibility, neglect might still result from a sober assessment of the difficulty of making the sound judgments that underlie effective voice and voting choices. In a typical political system, such "rational neglect" is likely, given the difficulty of arriving at deliberative judgments. The rational utility-maximizing denizens of economic models are not only presumed to doggedly pursue their self-interest, they are also assumed to know their interests. By contrast, in the model of representative democracy presented herein, a fundamental problem is the discernment and articulation of citizens' policy judgments. Chapters 3 and 5 demonstrate the rarity of adequate deliberative judgments, but here I wish to stress the profound difficulty of this problem even in theory.
Before a citizen can recognize the failure of an elected official to represent his or her interests, a citizen must first determine what those interests are.[55] When one looks beyond self-interested policy judgments to a citizen's estimation of what policies best serve the public interest, citizens must also make the effort to understand the needs and concerns of their fellow citizens—a challenge far greater than coming to know one's own interests. Once interests are developed, they must become more than tacit if they are to be of use in evaluating the performance of elected officials and the merits of political challengers. Much of what we come to know about ourselves and our social world is understood only unconsciously, and although we can generally use that knowledge in practice, it is difficult to apply it systematically unless it becomes conscious.[56]
Both exit and voice are also equally dependent on a related accomplishment—the successful evaluation of the incumbent's performance with regard to a citizen's interests or those of the general public. Now, the competent citizen must not only formulate interests but determine whether or not those have been (and will continue to be) served. Has the representative in question voted "properly" on relevant legislation? Has the representative made the voter's key issues top priorities while in office? Unless the voter can connect interests to performance, the voter will not know whether to reject an incumbent representative, let alone whether to exercise voice as a means of protest.
If the voter does decide that a public official has done a poor job as representative, yet another task lies ahead. As discussed more thoroughly in chapter 3, a voter must seek out alternative candidates as a means of electoral rejection and make similar judgments about the future performance of those candidates. This task is difficult because challengers usually have incommensurate political track records, if any at all. A voter must often make judgments based on hunches, analogies, and the misleading claims of the candidates themselves to gauge the likelihood that the opponent both shares the voter's views and will prove capable of pursuing those interests with the same vigor, skill, and resources as the incumbent.
Requiring interest formation and articulation, as well as incumbent and challenger evaluation, political exit is not the same as switching long-distance phone companies. The physical act of voting is not daunting to most citizens, but calculated acts of public expression and attempted electoral rejection are time-consuming and difficult. Only with the cognitive and emotional underpinnings described earlier can one expect citizens to avail themselves of opportunities for effective public expression and electoral action.[57]