Exit Legitimacy

Exit rights — rights to voluntarily renounce membership in an order or institution, along with all the rights and obligations that pertain to membership — make a critical, but oddly under-appreciated, contribution to the legitimacy of legal orders and institutions of all kinds. This contribution is particularly significant for international orders and institutions, which often lack the democratic, traditional, and other legitimating resources that are available to many of their national equivalents. In this article, I describe the distinctive contribution made by exit rights, which I call “exit legitimacy,” and I offer two accounts of its normative power. On the “thin” account, exit rights operationalize consent by making it more genuine, more ascertainable, and more closely related to relevant acts and relationships of governance; on the “thick” account, exit rights instantiate what I call “political autonomy.” Finally, I consider four of the strongest objections to which an account of exit legitimacy appears vulnerable. I show that none of these objections convincingly undermines the case for exit legitimacy, but that each provides useful guidance for crafting institutional mechanisms for the promotion of exit legitimacy