Hirschman and Spain's parties since 2015: exit, voice and loyalty

Albert O. Hirschman wrote Exit, Voice, and Loyalty in 1970 about railways, schools and firms, and it reads today like a commentary on Spain's party system since 2015. We've already explained the book and used it on young Spaniards' distrust of parties. This piece applies it to the decade itself: who left, who spoke up, and why loyalty ended up attached to blocs.

A quick reminder of the tools. When an organisation declines, its members can exit, by leaving, or use voice, by complaining from inside. Loyalty keeps them inside longer and gives voice time to work. Hirschman's sharpest warning, as the economist Rajiv Sethi summarises it, is that the most quality-conscious members are usually the first to leave, and their rapid exit paralyses voice by depriving it of its principal agents. He added a point about two-party politics: voters who have nowhere else to go have every reason to use voice, which is how activists can pull a party away from the centre.

2015: the great exit

For three decades Spanish voters had a weak exit option. In 2011 the PP and the PSOE together took 73.8% of the vote. That is the setting Hirschman would recognise as a comfortable duopoly, where each big party could lose voters to abstention or to the other without much changing inside.

Then the door opened. In the general election of 20 December 2015, with turnout of 69.7% according to the Junta Electoral Central's published results, the two big parties fell to 50.7% between them. Podemos, founded in January 2014, won 69 seats with its regional allies; Ciudadanos, born in Barcelona in 2006 in reaction to Catalan nationalism, won 40. Voters unhappy with how politics was done had found somewhere to go. Vox had already started the same move on the right, as a split by former PP members in December 2013, though it only entered Congress in April 2019, with 24 seats.

Hirschman would predict two things from this. The old parties would lose their most demanding voters, and the shock of exit would provoke voice among those who stayed. Both happened. In October 2016 the PSOE's federal committee forced out Pedro Sánchez and its caretaker leadership let Mariano Rajoy back into office by abstaining. In the primary of 21 May 2017 the members reversed that, giving Sánchez about half the vote against Susana Díaz and Patxi López, on a turnout of about 80% of registered members. The PP, which had never let its members choose a leader, held its first member vote in July 2018. The episode also showed voice's limits: of the 869,535 members the party claimed, only about 66,700 registered to vote, and Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría, who came first among members, lost to Pablo Casado in the delegates' round.

The newcomers and the missing loyalty

The new parties had the opposite problem. They were made of people who had just exercised exit, and they had had no time to build loyalty. Hirschman's mechanism worked against them at speed. Ciudadanos went from 57 seats in April 2019 to 10 in November, Albert Rivera left politics, and the party did not stand in the 2023 general election; in September 2023 it expelled Francisco Igea and Edmundo Bal for criticising that decision. A party that punishes voice gets exit. Podemos lost Íñigo Errejón's wing, ran inside Sumar in 2023 after a late deal and, on 5 December 2023, took its five deputies out of the Sumar group into the mixed group.

By the general election of 23 July 2023, the BOE's official results gave the PP 137 seats and 33.1% of valid votes and the PSOE 121 seats and 31.7%, counting the PSC: 64.8% together. Vox took 33 seats and Sumar 31. Turnout was 66.6%. The two big parties are back, now as the heads of two blocs, and the movement of voters mostly happens inside each bloc, from PP to Vox and back, from PSOE to Sumar and back. We looked at what that does to agreement in the piece on the two iron blocs. In Hirschman's language, loyalty moved from the party to the bloc, and the junior partner became the place where the bloc's activists exercise voice.

Democracia 21 belongs in the same story. Miriam González launched it on 10 October 2026, as Infobae reported, saying Spain cannot carry on with two iron blocs and that people are tired of voting with their noses held; the party stands in Madrid and Barcelona in the election of 29 November. It is an exit attempt from the bloc system, the latest in a decade of them, and we've mapped its proposals elsewhere. Hirschman's framework sets it the same test as Podemos and Ciudadanos: a party built by people who left needs voice and loyalty of its own quickly, or its voters leave in turn.

What the decade teaches

Each tradition has a piece of the answer. The left has long argued for members' rights: party members should choose their leaders and candidates, and that vote should bind. The right and the market-liberal tradition trust competition: the entry of new parties disciplines incumbents, as 2015 showed, and voters free to switch keep parties honest. Hirschman supplies the piece that belongs to neither camp. The two mechanisms need each other, and the design goal is exit cheap enough to be a credible threat and voice rewarded enough that the most demanding members stay. Then loyalty has to be earned.

Spain's law is halfway there. Since 2015, Article 7 of the Organic Law on Political Parties requires direct participation of members, especially in electing the party's top governing body. We would extend that to binding primaries for the heads of lists in general elections, with results that a delegates' congress cannot overturn, and to a published record of every internal vote. Entry costs matter too. The electoral law makes parties without seats in either chamber gather signatures from 0.1% of the registered voters in each constituency where they stand; letting citizens sign with the state's digital identification would keep the filter while cutting the cost of collecting them. And members expelled for public criticism should have a fast appeal to an independent party body before the decision takes effect.

Parties that listen keep their best members, and a system where new parties can enter gives every party a reason to listen. That combination, with a funding model that ties public money to support from citizens and a vote that reaches individual MPs, is how loyalty becomes something parties win.