My Debts to Albert O. Hirschman
In his office at the Institute for
Advanced Study, Princeton, where I met him in 1996-1997.
My numerous intellectual debts to
Albert Hirschman (1915-December 2012) include the following:
PARTICIPATION IN COLLECTIVE ACTION
At discussing collective action
under dictatorial regimes, I elaborated that, for some people, “in spite of the
drawbacks and privations of the activist life, action in itself may be
subjectively experienced as gratifying if it involves personal independence, a
certain scope for inventiveness and initiative, close fellowship with other people
of similar tastes, and other qualities harder t find in more conformist and
routine activity”.
In ‘Sisyphus and the Snowball’,
chapter 3 in Colomer, Game Theory and the
Transition to Democracy: The Spanish Model (1995). CLICK
All this chapter was a retrospective
self-reflection based on participant-observation. It made sense thanks to
Albert Hirschman’s “idea of participation as subjective gratifying in itself”,
as presented in his book Shifting
Involvements: Private Interest and Public Action (1982).
ACTORS IN POLITICAL CHANGE
All my modeling of democratization negotiations
was based on the definition of three strategies --named Nondemocracy, Intermediate
reform, and Democracy-- which permit six preference orders defining six
strategic actors in a process of political change. These form three blocs: the
Rulers, either hardliners or softliners, and the opposition, each with
fractions of radicals and moderates.
All this was strongly inspired in an
Albert Hirschman’s “digression” about “models of reformmongering” regarding
alternatives for economic change, which was included, with the telling title ‘Engineering
Reform with the Help of the Perspective of Revolution’, in his Journeys Toward Progress (1963), pp. 276
ff.
See my acknowledgements in Colomer, Game Theory and the Transition to Democracy (1995),
p. 25, and in Strategic Transitions: Game
Theory and Democratization (2000), p. 37.
MIGRATION POLITICS
Inspired by Albert Hirschman’s
comment:
"Latin American powerholders
have long encouraged their potential enemies and potential critics to remove
themselves from the scene through voluntary exile." (Exit, Voice, and
Loyalty, 1970: 60).
I took his categories of 'exit, 'voice'. and 'loyalty,' which Hirschman had applied to the analysis of emigration
and protests in East Germany, for the analysis of the case of Cuba. I proposed
to enlarge Hirschman’s scheme with a new category, ‘hostility’.
“Two
dimensions can be distinguished: 1) the actors' motives: relative satisfaction
or dissatisfaction with the present state of things in light of a conceivable
alternative; 2) the action target: the present state or the alternative. In the
case of Cuba, the present state of things is represented by a dictatorial government
and a socialist economy, while a conceivable alternative, according to the information
available to Cuban citizens, is a democratic regime with a capitalist economy
such as the one represented by the United States. According to this scheme,
relative dissatisfaction with the existing state can induce two actions: ‘Voice’,
which is an action against the existing state, and ‘exit’, which is an action
in favor of the alternative. Similarly, relative satisfaction or at least
acquiescence with the existing state can be associated with two actions:
'loyalty’, which is an action in favor of the existing state, as presented in
Hirschman’s original scheme, and 'hostility’, a term that I introduce to define
an action against the alternative (manifested in anti-American and
anti-imperialist sentiments). In other words, there are two possible actions regarding
the existing state (the Cuban regime in our analysis): voice (against) and
loyalty (in favor), and two possible actions regarding the alternative (the
United States): exit (in favor) and hostility (against).
These definitions can help to
clarify some relations of rivalry, complementarity, substitution and exclusion
between the different political actions…
“At moderate levels of relative satisfaction
with the present regime, ‘loyalty’ and ‘hostility’ are rival actions, but they can become
complementary actions for highly satisfied people --extremely proud patriots
may also be aggressively hostile to strangers... Like ‘voice’ and ‘loyalty’,
also 'exit' and 'hostility' can become substitutive actions. When would-be
emigrants run up against some restrictive U.S. migration policy, their
frustration and resentment may convert the desire for 'exit' into 'hostility'
towards the alternative state.”
Colomer, ‘Exit, Voice, and Hostility in Cuba’, International Migration Review, 2000, 34, 2: 423-442.
Sources:
Hirschman, A. O.
- Exit,
Voice, and Loyalty. Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1970.
- Rival
Views of Market Society and Other Recent Essays. New York: Viking, 1986.
- Essays
in Trespassing: Economics to Politics and Beyond. New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1981.
- ‘Exit, Voice, and the Fate of the
German Democratic Republic’, World
Politics, 1993, 45 (2): 173-202.
- A
Propensity to Self Subversion.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.
Professor Robert Axelrod at Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan, is the winner of the 2013 Johan Skytte Prize in political science. He is awarded the prize for “profoundly having changed our presumptions about the preconditions for human cooperation”. The Johan Skytte Prize is one of the finest and most prestigious prizes in political science.
