Chip Taylor

An example of the importance of information in exit and voice

One model of interjurisdictional competition is based on exit; another is based on voice. In the exit model, local officials try to improve services and hold down taxes to discourage people from leaving their community (and to encourage others, who are dissatisfied elsewhere, to move in).

In the voice model, residents compare the performance of their own local officials (with regard to public services and taxes) to those in other communities. If they find performance lacking in their own community, then they exercise voice (including voting at the ballot box) to bring about needed improvements.

Both models depend on access to information about other communities. If you lack that information, then have no basis for comparison. If you don't realize how bad things really are in your own home town, you are less likely to move or to complain.

So what? Well, it looks like Hurricane Katrina has provided a shock to the quantity of information that New Orleans residents possess about performance in other communities:

TALK to the people trickling back here, and it becomes apparent that before the hurricane, many had about as much experience living elsewhere as Ignatius J. Reilly, the protagonist in one of the seminal novels about New Orleans, "A Confederacy of Dunces," who had set foot outside this exceedingly rooted city only once (and rued doing so).

But after tasting life elsewhere, they are returning with tales of public schools that actually supply textbooks published after the Reagan era, of public housing developments that look like suburban enclaves, of government workers who are not routinely dragged off to prison after pocketing bribes.

Local leaders have realized for weeks that they must reckon with widespread anger over how they handled the relief effort. But it is dawning on them that they are also going to have to contend with demands from residents who grew accustomed, however briefly, to the virtues of other communities.

Many evacuees seem to be arriving with less tolerance for the failings of a city that under its glitzy makeup has long had an unsightly side. They do not want New Orleans to lose its distinctive character - after all, that is one reason they are back and vowing to rebuild. But they say their expectations have changed.

"What's wrong with our school system, and what's wrong with the people running our school board?" asked Tess Blanks, who had lived here all her life before fleeing with her husband, Horace, to the Houston area, where they discovered that the public schools for their two children were significantly better. "Our children fell right into the swing of things in Texas. So guess what? It isn't the children. It's the people running our school system."

...

Mayor C. Ray Nagin, who had styled himself a reformer before the hurricane, also acknowledged the new perspective.

"New Orleanians are very territorial people," Mr. Nagin said. "Some people had never left town. So they had no perspective of what was better from the standpoint of quality. They are going to come back with a different perspective of what should be and what could be. And I think that is going to put pressure on all of us as elected officials."