A Primer on Collective Action, I

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An introduction and reading list on how incentives, expectations, and political conditions shape participation in collective action.

Supplemental:

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My friend Kaustubh Kislay wanted to learn about social movements and how they succeed or fail. I’m making this actively maintained reading list for him and hope it can help more people. I will update this resource if I have additional clarifications or reading recommendations.

The list introduces frameworks for understanding collective action: why people participate in movements, the power of frames in organizing collective action, and what causes movements to fragment or deteriorate. Shared concern doesn’t automatically transfer to coordination, and initial participation doesn’t guarantee sustained participation. I cover incentives, relationships, institutions, shared perceptions, and expectations about what others will do as decision-making variables, drawing from my background in formal collective action and lived experience in social movements.

Collective action should not be understood as social movements alone, but rather as any effort that requires group coordination toward a common goal. An organization, for example, requires collective action.

This is the first of two parts, chiefly focusing on how people decide whether to participate in collective action. I will focus on frame theory and movement deterioration in Part II.

The frameworks I present examine different processes in collective action and sometimes offer competing explanations. I will follow my descriptions with critical evaluations of the frameworks and sometimes suggested applications. You will benefit most if you read 4–5 articles or chapter selections I list below; I strongly discourage solely reading this post and not exploring further.

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Incentives and group size

Traditional pluralist theory assumes that individuals with shared interests would naturally organize to achieve them.

Mancur Olson’s The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (1965) first challenged this through an instrumentally rationalist frame of collective action, arguing that rational individuals are incentivized to free-ride when a benefit is non-excludable, or able to be enjoyed by every individual. This incentive is especially salient in large groups where an individual’s absence has a negligible impact on the overall outcome. Thus, Olson argued large groups are inherently less effective at organizing than smaller groups, in which individual actions are highly visible and interdependent.

Pamela Oliver and Gerald Marwell’s “The Paradox of Group Size in Collective Action: A Theory of the Critical Mass. II.” (1988) challenged Olson’s argument by distinguishing between public goods with non-rivalrous costs and fully rivalrous costs.

They identified that Olson’s cost structure assumes the costs of a good scale linearly with the size of the group. Oliver and Marwell define this condition as zero jointness of supply (fully rivalrous costs), where goods cannot be jointly consumed. It follows that a larger group needs a larger supply and therefore more total effort. Under this condition, it remains true that, in a large enough group, an individual’s contribution is negligible to the total supply procured. We can imagine a collective consumption of apples as an example. If one eats an apple, another cannot also eat the apple. One’s enjoyment of the supply reduces the availability of the public good. 

Conversely, many public goods exhibit pure jointness of supply (non-rivalrous costs), where the cost of provision is fixed regardless of how many people benefit. Civil rights, for example, were the result of a fixed collective effort, and one’s enjoyment of the rights does not take away from another’s ability to benefit from it. Securing civil rights also does not require outsized contributions from all who now enjoy them. ‘Safe AI’ poses a similar public good.

In opposition to Olson, Oliver and Marwell suggest that when jointness is high (benefits can largely be enjoyed jointly), large groups have a higher probability of possessing a critical mass of highly resourceful or motivated individuals that make decisions to render contributions cost-effective for the rest of the collective.

Both Oliver and Marwell (1988) and Olson (1965) assume motivational homogeneity and choice independence, i.e., that one’s decision-making is independent from that of other stakeholding decision-makers.

Participation and expectations about others

Dennis Chong’s Collective Action and the Civil Rights Movement (1991) extends the incentive framework, highlighting selective incentives in collective action, specifically the social and psychological benefits of participation.

While acknowledging that people act upon principles, Chong argues that principled action is difficult to uphold when prohibitive. People want to participate in movements not only because they believe in the causes, but also because it provides personal and social validation among peers—especially if the movement succeeds, as one gains gratification from participating in a highly significant collective effort. Conversely, social costs pose a disincentive against defection.

Initial and continued willingness to participate is thus part of an assurance game: someone is willing to make sacrifices and contribute if they expect enough others to contribute too. 

Collective action is thus easier to build with a consensus on the viability of the movement; making this estimation requires tacit communication and cues to minimize prediction errors, which is easier to communicate through social networks and organizations. Group inaction from people waiting for each other, he argues, is prevented by a critical mass of highly committed and motivated individuals who will contribute when few others are willing. 

One must note, however, that individual incentives vary based on the social context, in that one’s perception of the reputational benefits of cooperation or costs of defection depend on whose approval matters and how those people interpret the action. Regardless, Chong’s writing on a participation threshold sheds light on micro-level processes of individual decision-making and the efficient facilitation of shared cognitions by organizations and networks.

Ivan Ermakoff makes similar arguments about an “action threshold” in great detail, with his recounting of the 1933 German parliamentary abdication of power to Hitler and the 1940 French surrender to Philippe Pétain in Ruling Oneself Out (2008) or in the shorter Politika article “Abdication and political collapse” (2018).

Ermakoff lays out three mechanisms of collective alignment under great uncertainty:

  • Sequential alignment: where one aligns one’s decision-making with the public decision-making of others. For example, one parliamentarian bases their voting decision on the voting decisions of other parliamentarians before them. This mechanism does not work when the sequence is interrupted or voting is nonpublic.
  • Inferential alignment: one infers group behavior from local knowledge, i.e., interactions with a sample group of peers. This mechanism is not effective if peers are unwilling to speak for fear of risking punishment.
  • Tacit alignment: one infers group behavior based on public events, i.e., highly visible stances taken by prominent actors.

Paradoxically, Kantian types—Ermakoff expounds—do not affect the inferences of others under intense collective uncertainty, as Kantian types adhere unconditionally to moral principles and do not make strategic assessments about the most viable political decision. However, when those who historically behaved pragmatically take a public stance, it significantly shifts the assessments of others, because if a strategic self-preserving actor makes a public defiance, there are two possibilities: either the actor is being incredibly brave, or the actor must possess discrete information that suggests that defiance is politically viable. This actor thereupon becomes a focal point for other hesitant actors to rally around.

Political conditions and perceived opportunity

Doug McAdam’s Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970 (1982) also places these decision-making processes within a broader political process framework. Through his account of the Civil Rights Movement, he argues that large-scale events—such as crises—influence organizational capacity and the political environment; both feed into a shift in collective perceptions of both the necessity for change and the efficacy of collective action.

In the 20th century, slowed immigration due to World War I and the decline of cotton induced the Great Migration, which in turn increased electoral leverage, organizational capacity, and thus insurgency prospects, where the Black population was previously disenfranchised, dispersed, and held a fatalistic attitude toward worldly conditions. 

However, Charles Kurzman’s “Structural Opportunity and Perceived Opportunity in Social-Movement Theory: The Iranian Revolution of 1979” (1996) and The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran (2004) contrast with McAdam’s account, distinguishing structural opportunity from perceived opportunity. The Iranian revolutionaries participated in a risky mobilization when they deemed it viable to succeed based on their assessments of mobilization size, despite no remarkable change in the geopolitical environment, economy, organizational capacity, motivational heterogeneity, or the state’s vulnerability. People may become willing to act based largely on perceived opportunity arising from growing collective mobilization.

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Thus far, I have focused on how rational actors decide whether to participate in collective action: the incentives they face, their expectations of others, and their assessments of whether the collective effort can succeed. These decisions undergo repeated reassessments after one joins a collective effort.

In Part II, I will pivot to how movements organize around shared interpretations through framing and what may cause them to fragment or deteriorate.

  1. You can’t split it in half. If one eats a half, the other cannot also eat that same half. One can’t punch the other in the stomach to make them throw up the half apple for one to eat, either.
  2. Chong’s “Coordinating Demands for Social Change” (1993) may be a suitable shorter reading. Though I recommend chapters 2, 3, 5, and 6 of Collective Action and the Civil Rights Movement.
  3. In part because increased numbers improve the likelihood of the movement succeeding, which in turn increases the perceived social and psychological reward of contributing to a movement after its success.
  4. One may imagine, for example, a scenario in which friends attempt to measure each other’s commitment to action, in turn so as to decide on their own commitment. The friends ask each other, “Are you going to do it?” with perhaps the unspoken understanding of “if you do it I’ll do it too.” Often it requires one or more members of the group to zealously declare that they will commit to the action to spring the entire group into action. All members, generally, have similar inclinations toward taking the action; the probing process is an attempt to reduce one’s uncertainty (their prediction errors) in the inclinations of others in the group.
  5. More specifically in the German case, Ermakoff refutes traditional historians who claim this capitulation occurred due to explicit coercion (intimidation by the SA/SS), ideological alignment (such as by the Catholic Center Party), or miscalculation (that Hitler could still be contained). He argues these explanations are disproved by first-person accounts and do not hold up under the expressed internal uncertainty and hesitation felt by individual delegates up to the final moments of the vote.
  6. The significance of a public stance, one could infer, arises from whether the responsible actor acts contrary to peer expectations. If one acts contrary to beliefs they previously acted upon conditionally, it may be a powerful signal. If a firm acts contrary to expectations that it would adhere to market incentives, it may also be an unusually powerful signal.
  7. I specifically recommend chapters 3 and 5.
  8. More specifically, on the last point, ideological conservatism was largely guided by church leaders; communities fixated on otherworldly rewards.
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