Political economy concepts and theoretical frameworks

Political Economy

Albert Hirschman has described two means of expressing dissatisfaction with a company in the political economy: exit and voice. Exit is when people stop buying or using a company's product or service en masse, while voice is when people express such dissatisfaction in writing or with the spoken word. This paper describes two real life situations where exit and voice were used to influence the political economy

One example of the use of "exit" in the real world as Hirschman describes it is the mass migration of customers from GoDaddy to other domain name registrars when it was discovered that the CEO of GoDaddy had been on safari and killed an elephant, and again when it was discovered that GoDaddy was supporting SOPA, the wildly unpopular internet privacy bill that was recently up before a vote in Congress (and was subsequently defeated). When the first incident came to light, thousands of GoDaddy customers were outraged and decided they could not support a company any longer whose leader would go out at kill endangered animals for sport. After all, the money they were paying to register their domains with GoDaddy was helping to pay the CEO's salary, which in turn was providing him with money to go on safari. Therefore, in an indirect way, registering domains with GoDaddy was akin to supporting and even paying for the slaughter of endangered species.

Thousands of customers moved their domain names to other registrars as a result. While moving a domain name to another registrar costs money (usually around $7 to $8), the many customers who did this felt it was worth it, because they were making a political statement that would have an impact on GoDaddy's bottom line. The fee to move the domains went to the registrar to which the domains were being moved, not to GoDaddy, plus GoDaddy would be losing out on all of the renewal fees for the domains that were moved.

A similar migration happened around a year later, when GoDaddy supported the unpopular internet privacy bill, SOPA. The public outrage at this support was so great that other domain registrars offered financial incentives to disaffected GoDaddy customers to move their domains. The domain registrar NameCheap, for example, offered free transfers of domains from GoDaddy to NameCheap on the day SOPA was supposed to be voted on in Congress. Tens of thousands of GoDaddy users took advantage of this additional opportunity to express their dissatisfaction with GoDaddy's policies in the political world with a financial solution by moving their domain names out of GoDaddy, where the company could not benefit from the domains in a monetary way any longer. This migration is an example of Hirschman's "exit" at its finest in the political economy.

An example of "voice" in the real world, as defined by Hirschman, is the Occupy Wall Street movement. This, of course, as spread far beyond Wall Street, with hundreds of cities all over the world now playing host to their own "occupy" movements. However, the purpose of the Occupy Wall Street movement and its satellites are the same: to express dissatisfaction with the way the current banking structure is organized and run in the United States.

As it stands, the banking system in the United States is set up to greatly benefit the wealthiest 1% of the population while giving little, if anything, in return to the remaining 99%. The government bailout of the banks when they were in a financial crisis underscored this favoring of the wealthy 1%, as many bank CEOs and other executives benefited from this bailout personally, using funds from the government to shore up their own finances, while giving back little, if anything to the majority of their customers who make up the 99%. The gap between the wealthy 1% and the remaining 99% in the United States is stark, and the whole situation with the banks made it even more apparent. While banks were busy foreclosing on the homes of people in the 99% who were negatively impacted by the economy, for example, the executives at the banks were busy collecting and profiting from government handouts that never benefited their customers in any way. Banks were no more willing to work out payment arrangements to stop foreclosures after getting their handouts than they were before they got them. It was all about giving more money to the wealthy, as far as the Occupy Wall Street protesters were concerned.