Abundant exit options make political commitment short-term and investor-like

Evidence

Hyperpolitics would be unthinkable without a particular set of social preconditions. Sociologically, it is rooted in a society in which exit options abound and citizens find it easy to move from one institution to another. Just as employment has become more precarious in the postindustrial era, abandoning a family, a relationship, a party, or a circle of friends is a much less demanding process than it was in Weber’s time. Temporally, such ease of exit produces a society in which all dimensions of life are subject to short-term logics; friendships, marriages, jobs, and political commitments are compressed into ever-shorter time frames. The changing coordinates of working life incentivize hyperpolitical behavior: employees with no hope of a permanent position are unlikely to identify strongly with their professional vocation. Even at the lower rungs of the labor market, individuals relate to their affiliations as investors at the stock exchange, allocating resources and withdrawing them once the return on investment is no longer guaranteed. — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 58

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gives the sociological precondition of hyperpolitics its mechanism: exit-option abundance compressing all commitments into short-term logics.
• XREF: The ‘individual as investor allocating and withdrawing’ metaphor resonates with Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty — voice without exit-options vs. exit-dominated hyperpolitics.