The Colonialist Roots of Democratic Decay: Collective Action, Experimental Psychology, and Spatial Discourse

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1 and 2-2018) ◽  
pp. 35-64
Author(s):  
Richard D. Anderson, Jr.

Democracy and dictatorship both depend on collective action, which humans avoid because it takes more effort than it is worth. Experimental psychology reveals that positive spatial discourse, explicit or implicit, reduces the effort that humans project a task to require. If so, dictatorships arise because explicit positive spatial cues, capable of retaining coherence only if assigning only to relatively few members of any population, generate the collective repression by a minority that establishes any dictatorship. Conversely the implicit cue to group size in a color metaphor, capable of assigning throughout a population, generates the universal franchise establishing a democracy. By supplementing spatial cues dividing Europeans with a metaphor of whiteness unifying Europeans and their settlers, colonialism made democracy possible once European withdrawal ended white dictatorship over colonial territories. But by erasing the condition that once secured the universal franchise among Europeans and their settlers, loss of colonies invigorates whites’ fears that hard won political rights have reverted to insecurity. That insecurity is responsible for the democratic decay now evident across Europe and its settler territories.

2019 ◽  
pp. 160-208
Author(s):  
Henrice Altink

This chapter zooms in on colour blindness. Focussing on the racial domains of politics and criminal justice, it explores the correlation between race and colour and the enjoyment of civil and political rights. It argues that it was not just government inaction but also a lack of collective action from race-first and other groups why dark-skinned Jamaicans struggled more than others to exercise their civil and political rights. But while successive governments lacked the commitment to create a society where all Jamaicans irrespective of race and colour could enjoy their ‘fundamental rights’, they did their best to present Jamaica as a colour-blind nation. This chapter will also explore the purposes of this myth of racial harmony that was developed after the Second World War.


2020 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yu-Hao Lee ◽  
Carlin Littles

PurposeSocial media platforms are increasingly used by activists to mobilize collective actions online and offline. Social media often provide visible information about group size through system-generated cues. This study is based on social cognitive theory and examines how visible group size on social media influences individuals' self-efficacy, collective efficacy and intentions to participate in a collective action among groups with no prior collaboration experiences.Design/methodology/approachA between-subject online experiment was conducted with a sample of 188 undergraduate participants in a large public university in the United States. Six versions of a Facebook event page with identical contents were created. The study manipulated the group size shown on the event page (control, 102, 302, 502, 702 and 902). Participants were randomly assigned to one of the six conditions and asked to read and assess an event page that calls for a collective action. Then their collective efficacy, self-efficacy and intentions to participate were measured.FindingsThe results showed that the system-aggregated group size was not significantly associated with perceived collective efficacy, but there was a curvilinear relationship between the group size and perceived self-efficacy. Self-efficacy partially mediated the relationship between group size and intentions to participate; collective efficacy did not.Originality/valueThe study contributes to social movement theories by moving beyond personal grievance and identity theories to examine how individuals' efficacy beliefs can be affected by the cues that are afforded by social media platforms. The study shows that individuals use system-generated cues about the group size for assessing the perceived self-efficacy and collective efficacy in a group with no prior affiliations. Group size also influenced individual decisions to participate in collective actions through self-efficacy and collective efficacy.


2017 ◽  
Vol 114 (28) ◽  
pp. 7337-7342 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin E. Langergraber ◽  
David P. Watts ◽  
Linda Vigilant ◽  
John C. Mitani

How can collective action evolve when individuals benefit from cooperation regardless of whether they pay its participation costs? According to one influential perspective, collective action problems are common, especially when groups are large, but may be solved when individuals who have more to gain from the collective good or can produce it at low costs provide it to others as a byproduct. Several results from a 20-y study of one of the most striking examples of collective action in nonhuman animals, territorial boundary patrolling by male chimpanzees, are consistent with these ideas. Individuals were more likely to patrol when (i) they had more to gain because they had many offspring in the group; (ii) they incurred relatively low costs because of their high dominance rank and superior physical condition; and (iii) the group size was relatively small. However, several other findings were better explained by group augmentation theory, which proposes that individuals should bear the short-term costs of collective action even when they have little to gain immediately if such action leads to increases in group size and long-term increases in reproductive success. In support of this theory, (i) individual patrolling effort was higher and less variable than participation in intergroup aggression in other primate species; (ii) males often patrolled when they had no offspring or maternal relatives in the group; and (iii) the aggregate patrolling effort of the group did not decrease with group size. We propose that group augmentation theory deserves more consideration in research on collective action.


2013 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yasuyuki Sawada ◽  
Ryuji Kasahara ◽  
Keitaro Aoyagi ◽  
Masahiro Shoji ◽  
Mika Ueyama

In a canonical model of collective action, individual contribution to collective action is negatively correlated with group size. Yet, empirical evidence on the group size effect has been mixed, partly due to heterogeneities in group activities. In this paper, we first construct a simple model of collective action with the free rider problem, altruism, public goods, and positive externalities of social networks. We then empirically test the theoretical implications of the group size effect on individual contribution to four different types of collective action, i.e., monetary or nonmonetary contribution to directly or indirectly productive activities. To achieve this, we collect and employ artefactual field experimental data such as public goods and dictator games conducted in southern Sri Lanka under a natural experimental situation where the majority of farmers were relocated to randomly selected communities based on the government lottery. This unique situation enables us to identify the causal effects of community size on collective action. We find that the levels of collective action can be explained by the social preferences of farmers. We also show evidence of free riding by self-interested households with no landholdings. The pattern of collective action, however, differs significantly by mode of activity—collective action that is directly rather than indirectly related to production is less likely to suffer from the free rider problem. Also, monetary contribution is less likely to cause free riding than nonmonetary labor contribution. Unlike labor contributions, monetary contributions involve collection of fees which can be easily tracked and verified, possibly leading to better enforcement of collective action.


2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge Peña ◽  
Georg Nöldeke

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.


2000 ◽  
Vol 355 (1403) ◽  
pp. 1593-1597 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Haig ◽  
Jon F. Wilkins

Genomic imprinting has been proposed to evolve when a gene's expression has fitness consequences for individuals with different coefficients of matrilineal and patrilineal relatedness, especially in the context of competition between offspring for maternal resources. Previous models have focused on pre–emptive hierarchies, where conflict arises with respect to resource allocation between present and future offspring. Here we present a model in which imprinting arises from scramble competition within litters. The model predicts paternal–specific expression of a gene that increases an offspring's fractional share of resources but reduces the size of the resource pool, and maternal–specific expression of a gene with opposite effects. These predictions parallel the observation in economic models that individuals tend to underprovide public goods, and that the magnitude of this shortfall increases with the number of individuals in the group. Maternally derived alleles are more willing than their paternally derived counterparts to contribute to public goods because they have a smaller effective group size.


2012 ◽  
Vol 279 (1749) ◽  
pp. 4946-4954 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna-Claire Schneider ◽  
Alicia P. Melis ◽  
Michael Tomasello

We presented small groups of chimpanzees with two collective action situations, in which action was necessary for reward but there was a disincentive for individuals to act owing to the possibility of free-riding on the efforts of others. We found that in simpler scenarios (experiment 1) in which group size was small, there was a positive relationship between rank and action with more dominant individuals volunteering to act more often, particularly when the reward was less dispersed. Social tolerance also seemed to mediate action whereby higher tolerance levels within a group resulted in individuals of lower ranks sometimes acting and appropriating more of the reward. In more complex scenarios, when group size was larger and cooperation was necessary (experiment 2), overcoming the problem was more challenging. There was highly significant variability in the action rates of different individuals as well as between dyads, suggesting success was more greatly influenced by the individual personalities and personal relationships present in the group.


1995 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-200 ◽  
Author(s):  
AXEL FRANZEN
Keyword(s):  

2016 ◽  
Vol 389 ◽  
pp. 72-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge Peña ◽  
Georg Nöldeke
Keyword(s):  

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