Poor, Oppressed and Angry; Rich, Free and Ignorant : Applying Political Economy on Hirschman's Voice

Abstract: Societies will always fail to live up to the expectations of citizens one way or another, independent of their economic and political standards. Albert Hirschman proposed that citizens then have the option of expressing their voice for social change. This paper sets up a rational choice model of voice to empirically test whether higher levels of political and economic grievance make it more likely for citizens of a country to have a collective voice. The main result from the probit regression is that an increase in the level of democracy has a negative effect on the probability of voice, all else being equal.