The Politics of Exit

Do exit options like emigration reduce pressure on governments, elites, or institutions to undertake difficult political reforms? If so, what are the broader consequences, both for those with and without access to exit options? This book examines how the possibility of leaving influences individuals' willingness and ability to participate in collective action and the prospects for political change. Developing a novel theory of exit options and collective action, Sellars illustrates how simply offering people the option to leave can make it difficult to organize collective responses to political opportunities or challenges. Because many types of political activity require coordination with others, from protests and strikes to letter-writing campaigns and community organizing, the presence of exit options can change the behavior even of people who cannot leave directly. The Politics of Exit examines this argument by tracing the history of emigration and agrarian politics in Mexico over roughly a century, from the Mexican Revolution until the early twenty-first century. Using detailed subnational data on rural agitation and land redistribution, the book shows that collective political mobilization and government responsiveness declined when and where emigration to the United States became easier or more attractive. The work traces the causal mechanisms through which ongoing emigration complicated collective action contemporaneously and over a longer time horizon, illustrating how the possibility of leaving made it difficult to sustain pressure for reform, why people felt compelled to pursue “voluntary” exit options in place of trying to effect change from within, and how governments and elites used the promise of exit to undermine the threat of opposition or unrest. Sellars provides a new framework for considering whether exit options are always empowering to those who possess them, how individual exit options can influence others, and how to understand the popular representation of emigration as a safety valve for political conflict.