where citizens have possessed the resources to emigrate and have
identified a state which would welcome them, a state they, too,
would welcome as infinitely better than the one they want to quit,
and yet they have not been permitted to emigrate, or else the
process of emigration has been made hazardous, overcostly or
humiliating. One thinks of the predicament of Jews in the former
Soviet Union. This episode makes it clear that states which frus-
trate their citizens’ wishes to emigrate cannot attribute to such
citizens a tacit consent deriving from their continuing residence.
Nor can it use such an argument in the case of citizens who do not
wish to leave. That these conclusions are obvious shows that the
argument for tacit consent from the lack of explicit dissent
need not be as crude as it is in Locke’s statement, nor quite as
vulnerable as Hume’s counterexample suggests.
Arguments from tacit consent, in these familiar forms, do apply
to some. The state has widened its net yet again and caught some
more citizens in it. But there will still remain plenty of citizens
who can, in good faith, reject its imputation. So the state seeks out
further arguments.Quasi-consent
In Democracy and Disobedience, Peter Singer discusses the specific
question of whether citizens of a democratic state have particular
reasons to accept the duties of the citizen as determined by major-
ity rule. Thus far, we have spoken of the state and ignored the
nature of its constitution. We could have been discussing any old
state. The only question in hand was whether the citizens actually
consented through the mechanisms of original contract, express
or tacit consent. Singer introduces the notion of quasi-consent to
explain the distinctive form of not-quite-consent which is implicit
in the behaviour of voters. Their behaviour, he believes, mimics
consent. They act as if they consent and the same normative con-
clusions may be drawn from their behaviour as are drawn in the
case of actual consent.^39 If we describe the action of voting, taking
the polling card and handing it over to the polling officer,
receiving a voting slip and crossing the box in a private booth then
placing the voting paper in a ballot box for counting, nothing
POLITICAL OBLIGATION