What to lobby on? Explaining why large American firms lobby on the same or different issues

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 449-476
Author(s):  
Niels Selling
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Market Structure ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Action Theory ◽  
Interorganizational Relations ◽  
Policy Issues ◽  
Interorganizational Ties ◽  
Favorable Conditions

AbstractWhat determines whether or not firms lobby on the same policy issues? Scholars offer two broad answers to this question. Firms that are (1) similar or (2) connected through interorganizational ties target the same policy issues. In this article, I argue that the co-occurrence of these two conditions produces the opposite outcome, namely a tendency to lobby on different issues. This expectation draws on ideas from collective action theory and the literature on issue niches. From these, I derive the following assumptions: similar firms share political objectives and they should, when possible, act collectively by jointly delegating their lobbying activities. The reason for doing this is that it allows them to focus on their issue niches. However, the ability to delegate hinges on coordination and monitoring, which is facilitated by interorganizational relations. To test this proposition, I study the largest American corporations. The dependent variable is activity overlap, a measure of the extent to which firms lobby on the same issues. According to expectations, activity overlap is reduced when firms operate in the same industry and, simultaneously, enjoy favorable conditions for social interactions, such as a concentrated market structure. These results lend support to collective action theory.

When and Where Do Women's Legislative Caucuses Emerge?

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 671-694 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Mitchell Mahoney ◽  
Christopher J. Clark
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Event History Analysis ◽  
Organizational Structures ◽  
Legislative Behavior ◽  
Ability To Act ◽  
Original Dataset ◽  
History Analysis ◽  
Institutional Norms ◽  
Favorable Conditions

Women have organized around their gendered identity to accomplish political goals both inside and outside legislatures. Formal and informal institutional norms shape the form this collective action takes and whether it is successful. What, then, are the favorable conditions for organizing women's caucuses inside legislatures? Using an original dataset and employing an event history analysis, we identify the institutional conditions under which women's caucuses emerged in the 50 US states from 1972 to 2009. Within a feminist institutional framework, we argue that women's ability to alter existing organizational structures and potentially affect gender norms within legislatures is contextual. Although we find that women's presence in conjunction with Democratic Party control partially explains women's ability to act collectively and in a bipartisan way within legislatures, our analysis suggests that institutional-level variables are not enough to untangle this complicated phenomenon. Our work explains how gender and party interact to shape legislative behavior and clarifies the intractability of institutional norms while compelling further qualitative evidence to uncover the best conditions for women's collective action within legislatures.

scholarly journals Understanding participation dilemmas in community mobilisation: can collective action theory help?

2018 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lu Gram ◽  
Nayreen Daruwalla ◽  
David Osrin
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Action Theory ◽  
Critical Mass ◽  
Community Mobilisation ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Middle Income ◽  
Incentive Mechanisms ◽  
Theoretical Predictions ◽  
Selective Incentives

Community mobilisation interventions have been used to promote health in many low-income and middle-income settings. They frequently involve collective action to address shared determinants of ill-health, which often requires high levels of participation to be effective. However, the non-excludable nature of benefits produced often generates participation dilemmas: community members have an individual interest in abstaining from collective action and free riding on others’ contributions, but no benefit is produced if nobody participates. For example, marches, rallies or other awareness-raising activities to change entrenched social norms affect the social environment shared by community members whether they participate or not. This creates a temptation to let other community members invest time and effort. Collective action theory provides a rich, principled framework for analysing such participation dilemmas. Over the past 50 years, political scientists, economists, sociologists and psychologists have proposed a plethora of incentive mechanisms to solve participation dilemmas: selective incentives, intrinsic benefits, social incentives, outsize stakes, intermediate goals, interdependency and critical mass theory. We discuss how such incentive mechanisms might be used by global health researchers to produce new questions about how community mobilisation works and conclude with theoretical predictions to be explored in future quantitative or qualitative research.

Franchise systems and lobbying: implications for Olsonian collective action theory

2018 ◽  
Vol 56 (11) ◽  
pp. 2357-2372
Author(s):  
Richard S. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Action Theory ◽  
Negative Relationship ◽  
System Size ◽  
Industry Structure ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
Corporate Political Activity ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Political Activities

Purpose Previous research combining corporate political activity and collective action theory has focused solely on industry structure and its role in predicting group lobbying or PAC participation. The purpose of this paper is to use a different context—franchise systems—to apply Olsonian collective action theory to political activities. Design/methodology/approach Using a random-effects technique in STATA on an unbalanced panel data set, this paper empirically models the effects of franchise system size and degree of franchising on the level of lobbying intensity. Findings Since franchise systems are made up of differing unit ownership structure, the author first model if those systems that are fully franchised lobby less than those with franchisor unit ownership (supported). Next, since collective action theory predicts that more participants in a space will lead to less collective action, the author predict that franchise systems with larger unit counts will lobby less than those with smaller counts (not supported). Finally, the author test the interaction of these two effects as systems that are fully franchised and of higher unit totals should have an even greater negative relationship with political activity (supported). Originality/value This paper uses both a novel data set and a novel context to study collective action. Previous research has utilized an industry structure context to model the level of lobbying and collective action, while the current research uses an analogous logic, but in the context of franchise systems.

Improving the success of “bottom-up” development work by acknowledging the dynamics among stakeholders: a case study from an Engineers Without Borders water supply project in Tenganan, Indonesia

2009 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 279-287 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Bowen ◽  
G. Acciaioli
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Water Supply ◽  
Capacity Building ◽  
Action Theory ◽  
Development Work ◽  
Development Projects ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Building Project ◽  
Engineers Without Borders

This paper presents a model of development action synthesising the development arena framework with collective action theory. It shows how application of this model in the Engineers Without Borders Australia (EWB) water supply improvement and capacity building project in Tenganan, Indonesia has helped to maximise the extent to which the project practice can reflect the project rhetoric as “bottom-up” or community-inspired. The model posits a broad range of stakeholders actively engaged in development action: each stakeholder is different, with its own interests, missions, procedures, and ways of deploying power in development action. Recognising the multiplicity of subjects of development is especially crucial for improving bottom-up practice. Connections and interactions among stakeholders are inherently problematic, and must be negotiated to accomplish development work, as tensions in the dynamic among stakeholders may operate to restrict the success of these “bottom-up” development projects.

scholarly journals Place Attachment and Collective Action Tendency

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Michał Jaśkiewicz ◽  
Tomasz Besta
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Place Attachment ◽  
Active Form ◽  
The Third ◽  
Action Tendency ◽  
Action Tendencies ◽  
Attachment Place

Three studies were carried out to examine how place attachment and collective action tendency are related and what role self-expansion and social interactions play in this relationship. In the first study (N = 156) we found that a more active form of attachment – place discovered – is a significant predictor of tendency to engage in collective action in favor of one’s neighborhood. In the second study (N = 197), we focused on frequency of social interactions in one’s neighborhood as the antecedent of place attachment and collective action tendencies. We found that inhabitants who declared more frequent social interactions in one’s neighborhood, expressed stronger place discovered, and this attachment is related to collective action tendencies. In the third study (N = 153), we tested if self-expansion mediates this relationship. We found that stronger place discovered was related to the feeling of self-expansion that resulted from contact with neighbors. Moreover, self-expansion was related to the tendency to engage in collective action.

scholarly journals Variability in group size and the evolution of collective action

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge Peña ◽  
Georg Nöldeke
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Group Size ◽  
Replicator Dynamics ◽  
Cooperative Behavior ◽  
Biased Sampling ◽  
Multiplayer Games ◽  
Collective Action Problems ◽  
Payoff Structure ◽  
Group Size Distribution

AbstractModels of the evolution of collective action typically assume that interactions occur in groups of identical size. In contrast, social interactions between animals occur in groups of widely dispersed size. This article models collective action problems as two-strategy multiplayer games and studies the effect of variability in group size on the evolution of cooperative behavior under the replicator dynamics. The analysis identifies elementary conditions on the payoff structure of the game implying that the evolution of cooperative behavior is promoted or inhibited when the group size experienced by a focal player is more or less variable. Similar but more stringent conditions are applicable when the confounding effect of size-biased sampling, which causes the group-size distribution experienced by a focal player to differ from the statistical distribution of group sizes, is taken into account.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document