Collective Action and Group Heterogeneity: Voluntary Provision Versus Selective Incentives

1993 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 329 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas D. Heckathorn
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Voluntary Provision ◽  
Group Heterogeneity ◽  
Selective Incentives

Collective Action

2019 ◽  
pp. 466-488
Author(s):  
Jac C. Heckelman
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Critical Appraisal ◽  
Slow Growth ◽  
Policy Reform ◽  
Free Riding ◽  
Institutional Instability ◽  
Selective Incentives ◽  
Mancur Olson

The theory of collective action, as outlined by Mancur Olson, is presented. Olson argued that individuals are subject to free-riding behavior, which can be overcome by selective incentives. The larger is the potential group, the greater the hurdles to successful formation. Thus, smaller groups with more narrow interests are more likely to form, leading to an emphasis on policy reform that concentrates benefits to the group while diffusing the costs on greater society. The accumulation of such groups will slow growth, and this sclerotic effect is reversed due to institutional instability. This chapter develops a critical appraisal of the theory and the accumulated evidence in the literature that follows from Olson.

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.

Institutional Structure and the Logic of Ongoing Collective Action

1987 ◽  
Vol 81 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Bendor ◽  
Dilip Mookherjee
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Hierarchical Structure ◽  
Prisoner’S Dilemma ◽  
Institutional Structure ◽  
Herbert Simon ◽  
Conditional Cooperation ◽  
Mutual Cooperation ◽  
Selective Incentives ◽  
Individual Choices

Work by Axelrod, Hardin, and Taylor indicates that problems of repeated collective action may lessen if people use decentralized strategies of reciprocity to induce mutual cooperation. Hobbes's centralized solution may thus be overrated. We investigate these issues by representing ongoing collective action as an n-person repeated prisoner's dilemma. The results show that decentralized conditional cooperation can ease iterated collective action dilemmas—if all players perfectly monitor the relation between individual choices and group payoffs. Once monitoring uncertainty is introduced, such strategies degrade rapidly in value, and centrally administered selective incentives become relatively more valuable. Most importantly, we build on a suggestion of Herbert Simon by showing that a hierarchical structure, with reciprocity used in subunits and selective incentives centrally administered, combines the advantages of the decentralized and centralized solutions. This hierarchical form is more stable than the decentralized structure and often secures more cooperation than the centralized structure. Generally, the model shows that the logic of repeated decision making has significant implications for the institutional forms of collective action.

Soft Incentives and Collective Action: Participation in the Anti-Nuclear Movement

1986 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karl-Dieter Opp
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Public Good ◽  
Collective Good ◽  
Nuclear Movement ◽  
Good Will ◽  
Selective Incentives ◽  
Joint Contribution

The standard explanation of collective action in modern political economy can be outlined as follows: a collective (or public) good is only an incentive for a joint contribution to its provision, if those who benefit from the good at least perceive some influence arising from their contribution, the costs of contributing being otherwise greater than the benefits derived from it; otherwise joint efforts for the provision of the collective good will not ensue. If the good itself does not stimulate collective action, contributions will nevertheless occur when selective incentives become effective. These are benefits arising from contributing and/or costs resulting from no contribution being made.

What Makes Rational Peasants Revolutionary? Dilemma, Paradox, and Irony in Peasant Collective Action

1994 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 383-418 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark I. Lichbach
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
The Self ◽  
Political Struggle ◽  
Collective Action Problem ◽  
Demand And Supply ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Questions And Answers ◽  
Selective Incentives ◽  
Peasant Resistance ◽  
Peasant Organizations

Peasant upheavals are studied from the perspective offered by the selective incentives solution to Olson's collective action problem. This article presents much evidence from three different forms of peasant struggles—everyday forms of peasant resistance, unorganized rural movements, and organized peasant rebellions—that demonstrates the widespread existence of selective incentives. Questions about the causes and consequences of selective incentives are then examined. First, what are the conditions under which peasant struggles emphasize material selective incentives rather than nonmaterial altruistic appeals? The level of selective incentives in any peasant upheaval is a function of demand and supply considerations. Peasants demand selective incentives. The suppliers include one or more dissident peasant organizations, the authorities, and the allies of both. A political struggle ensues as the suppliers compete and attempt to monopolize the market. Second, what are the conditions under which the pursuit of material self-interest hurts rather than helps the peasantry's collective cause? Selective incentives supplemented by ideology can be effective; selective incentives alone are counterproductive.These questions and answers lead to the conclusion that the selective incentives solution reveals much more about peasant upheavals than simply that peasants will often be concerned with their own material self-interest. It is therefore important to study the following three aspects of peasant collective action: the dilemma peasants face, or how peasant resistance is in the interest of all peasants but in the self-interest of none; the paradox peasants face, or that rational peasants do solve their dilemma (for example, with selective incentives) and participate in collective action; and the irony peasants face, or that self-interest is both at the root of their dilemma and at the foundation of a solution to their paradox.

scholarly journals Nye former for samfunnsengasjement og kollektiv handling

2018 ◽  
pp. 7-30
Author(s):  
Bernard Enjolras ◽  
Ivar Eimhjellen
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Civic Engagement ◽  
Civil Society Organizations ◽  
Main Question ◽  
Digital Networks ◽  
Formal Organizations ◽  
Selective Incentives ◽  
Connective Action ◽  
New Form

This chapter introduces the book’s main topics and analytical frame. With the development of societal meta-processes of change such as digitalization, individualization and globalization, the condition of collective action are under transformation. The main question, addressed by this book, is whether a new form of collective action – connective action – can be empirically identified when looking at the late developments in Norway. The need for formal organizations and selective incentives has been emphasized as a solution to the “collective action problem”. Digitalization, by enabling “organizing without organizations” is expected to enhance new forms of collective action that are more individualized and do not require formal organizations. Additionally, since digital networks cross territorial boundaries, collective action is expected to take a transnational character. With such a backdrop, the contributions assembled in this book, based on extensive empirical investigations, examine the extent to which digitalization transforms civic engagement, whether the boundary between volunteerism and political activism are becoming increasingly blurred, whether new organizing forms are emerging in the wake of digitalization, and whether it is possible to identify new forms of transnational collective action. Taken together, the contributions to this book do not support the emergence of a new form of collective action. On the contrary, in spite of the transformations affecting the forms of collective action and civic engagement, the empirical evidence emphasize the continued importance of the infrastructure constituted of civil society organizations for supporting collective action.

scholarly journals The Rise and Fall of the English Defence League: Self-Governance, Marginal Members and the Far Right

2018 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
pp. 539-556 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth A Morrow ◽  
John Meadowcroft
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Qualitative Data ◽  
Governance Mechanisms ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Sudden Rise ◽  
Street Protest ◽  
Selective Incentives ◽  
Low Levels ◽  
The Uk

What determines the success or failure of far-right organisations? This article uses new qualitative data to explain the sudden rise and subsequent decline of the English Defence League, an anti-Islamic, street protest organisation established in the UK in 2009. We explain the rise and fall of the English Defence League through the lens of the theory of collective action to show that the English Defence League initially motivated activism by supplying selective incentives that were enhanced by the participation of others. The pursuit of ‘participatory crowding’ led to indiscriminate recruitment into the organisation that enabled numbers to expand into the thousands, but ultimately caused the English Defence League’s downfall because it resulted in the presence of large numbers of ‘marginal members’ with low levels of commitment whose subsequent exit was decisively destructive. Self-governance mechanisms to ensure greater loyalty from members could have prevented the English Defence League’s decline but would also have limited its initial success.

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