The Three Exit,Three Voice and Loyalty Framework:A Test with Survey Data on Local Services Keith Dowding Peter John Australian National University and London School of Economics and Political Science University of Manchester The article presents a modified Hirschman framework with three types of exit: moving location; moving from the public to a private sector provider;and moving between public sector providers;and three types of voice: private voice (complaining about private goods); voting; and collective action. Seven hypotheses are generated from this framework. The article then presents evidence from the first round of an online survey examining citizen satisfaction with public services and the relationship between exit and voice opportunities.We find dissatisfied people are more likely to complain privately,vote and engage in other forms of collective participation; but only a weak relationship exists between dissatisfaction and geo- graphical exit.We find some evidence that the exit–voice trade-off might exist as more alert consumers are more likely to move from the public to the private sector and those ‘locked in’ are more likely to complain than those who have outside options. Overall the results tend to corroborate the hypotheses drawn from the modified Hirschman framework. If ‘competition’ was the mantra for public service reform of the Thatcher gov- ernments, then ‘choice’ had the same function for Blair’s. The two terms cover much the same territory, though each emphasises different aspects of a process supposed to provide efficiency in public services. The idea, of course, is that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector because of the discipline of competition. Firms that do not produce the products people want at the price they want are driven out of business by those that do.Competition provides the incentives to cut costs in order to drive down prices,and to produce the products people want:so both productive and allocative efficiency are driven by market competition. Consumer choice is the motor that drives competition, along with free entry into the industry which is supposed to ensure that multiple firms compete.Shifting the emphasis away from the competitive aspects of the process to the choice features softens the driving edge and concentrates attention on to the consumer side. It emphasises that people can be in control of their public services rather than being serviced as clients by a rule-driven bureaucracy. Choice also fits nicely with the idea of freedom as control which has greater modern resonance than the terms equality or welfare. There has always been some tension in the idea of introducing market compe- tition into public service provision. The reason we have public provision for some doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2007.00688.x POLITICAL STUDIES: 2008 VOL 56, 288–311 © 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 Political Studies Association