Collective Action And Mobilization Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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“You would not be reading this essay,” writes Elinor Ostrom, “if it were not for some of our ancestors learning how to undertake collective action to solve social dilemmas.” By collective action, scholars mean any situation that requires people to act jointly. “The theory of collective action,” Ostrom continues, “is the central subject of political science.” Solving collective action problems entails overcoming the potential costs and risks of acting collectively, and the possibility that potential cooperators will defect or decline to cooperate. Collective action problems pervade everything from international relations to budgeting in legislatures, decision making in bureaucracies, voting, interest group formation, and citizen control of government. “If political scientists do not have an empirically grounded theory of collective action,” Ostrom concludes, “then we are hand-waving at our central questions.” She goes on to list a bibliographic battery of the many fields to which collective action theory has made central contributions in the last fifty years: from economist and social scientist Mancur Olson’s (1965) path breaking book to recent work ranging from epoch-making events (e.g., revolutions) to trivial issues (e.g., how cheerleaders solve their collective action problems). Social dilemmas, Ostrom concludes, “are found it all aspects of life.”

In her recent work, Ostrom strives to specify a number of structural variables that affect cooperative behavior. However, she correctly observes that structure isn’t everything and that “a theory of boundedly rational, norm-based human behavior is a better foundation for explaining collective action than a model of maximizing material payoffs to self.” She makes clear that individuals can solve their collective action problems. Indeed, Ostrom cites abundant evidence from empirical work that individuals achieve better results—results beyond being rational—in confronting social dilemmas by building conditions in which reciprocity, reputation, and trust help to overcome the strong temptations of short-run self-interest.

Yet, while collective action problems are part of just about everything, this is not to say that they are everything. In literature surrounding the tragedy of the commons, the external “other” could be nature. The work of scholars Arun Agrawal, Robert Ellickson, Ronald Herring, Subir Sinha, and Robert Wade reveals that property systems; decisions of landlords, middlemen, and consumers; changes in climate and rainfall; and informal understandings all mediate commons’ situations. But even more fundamentally, how close does the “solution”

to the collective action problem come to the solution of the problem of mobilization? The problem of mobilization, subsequently, can be defined as the increase in a contender’s available resources for collectively making claims in relation to some external actor or system of actors. Once mobilization occurs in relation to external actors, then the importance of the collective action problem becomes less than “everything” and may actually be affected by mobilization.

The efforts of states to cooperate against the prospective threat of a hostile state is one example of collective action and mobilization; their cooperation problem depends, among other things, on the other state’s resource base, its strategic calculations, its own collective action problems, and the positioning of third parties. A high probability of aggressive intentions on the part of that state is likely to have more influence on the propensity of potential cooperators to cooperate than their inherent capacity to achieve cooperation. Uncertainties are equally critical in decisions to mobilize: the French revolutionaries who launched wars on their neighbors were driven more by fear of their intentions than by their own ability to solve their collective action problems; indeed, the fear of invasion increased their ability to overcome these problems.

In the social movement field, the solution to the problem of achieving internal cooperation is even more deeply imbricated with external factors. Unlike states facing external opponents, movements are never unitary actors. They depend on external support or opposition that cannot be predicted in advance, and movements must respond to shifts in the opportunities and threats that they face outside the group. These three issues come together in the problem of mobilization.

Mobilization is a process drawing on internal resources to connect actors with significant others outside the group and with the rules and repertoires of systemic politics. For connecting groups to effectively make claims on others who are significant to their external environments, more must be learned about mobilization as the link between internal group problems and that group’s external environment. This means connecting what have been, until now, largely distinct traditions of research: research on collective action in the tradition from Olson to Ostrom and research on contentious politics from Charles Tilly to Doug McAdam.

Collective Action Theory

Olson made social movement scholars aware that there is such a thing as a collective action problem and that it could be used to explain the finding that actors who “should” act collectively often don’t. Olson’s work converges with the growing observation that grievances alone cannot explain mobilization because, if they did, social conflict and mobilization would be constant. Olson posits that, on average, no more than 5 percent of a given population could be expected to mobilize. Olson forced scholars of social movements to wrestle with the puzzle of the free rider. While Gerald Marwell and Pam Oliver focused on the critical mass that would enable collective action to mount, Nor man Frohlich and Joe A. Oppenheimer extended the theory into hypotheses about the relations within groups; Samuel Popkin showed how revolutionary organization could combat the free-rider problem; Mark Lichbach shaped it into the “rebel’s dilemma”; and Dennis Chong used it as the central puzzle in his work on the civil rights movement.

While influential, Olson’s integration into the study of movements was slow and uneven because he wanted to explain why collective action was unlikely during a decade when contentious politics buzzed and bloomed. Empirically oriented economists, like Albert Hirschman, were quick to point to this paradox. Sociologists including William Gamson and his collaborators used quasi-experiments to examine the conditions in which the collective action problem is “solved”; they focused on the perception of the authorities’ injustice. Others observed that the collective action problem is less intense for what they called “conscience constituents” than for self-oriented materialists. Finally, although he named his theory collective action, Olson had little to say beyond the aggregation of individual motivations. He gave little attention to the political and institutional contexts within which collective action episodes are launched, and the historical and cultural traditions that link actors to one another and guide their expectations. How could collective action theory be reconciled with the buzzing and blooming movement cycle of the 1960s?

Answers to this paradox were proposed, first, by Frohlich, Oppenheimer, and Oren Young and then by John McCarthy and Mayer Zald. The former argued that the collective action problem could be attacked successfully when someone (e.g., a political entrepreneur) finds it profitable to set up an organization (or make use of some existing organization), collect resources, and supply the goods in question. If the sum of resources collected is smaller than the value of the collective good to all recipients, yet larger than the entrepreneur’s cost in supplying it, the collective action serves the interest of the entrepreneur as well as the collective interest. Similarly, while McCarthy and Zald agreed with Olson that the collective action problem was real, they argued that the expanded personal resources, professionalization, financial support, and organizations available to citizens in modern societies provide an answer to the dilemma—professional movement organizations.

This work led to three decades of productive theorizing and research on the organizational foundations of social movement organizations, but it also produced a cottage industry of criticism. First, like Frohlich and colleagues, McCarthy and Zald used the language of microeconomics (e.g., they wrote of movement entrepreneurs, movement industries, movement sectors), offending scholars who had come to social movement research from activist careers; second, they ignored the self-production of grassroots organizations in the process of mobilization. Soon, an alternative model, emphasizing informal participation and internal democracy, arose. The virtue of that approach was to show that mobilization can produce second-order organizations that continue after the initial impetus or threat has evaporated. This in turn led to the theory of cycles of contention that produce externalities that encourage collective action.

Three Forms Of Mobilization

From both perspectives, attention centered on the process of mobilization, and this quickly bifurcated into three streams. They can be called micromobilization, mesomobilization, and macromobilization.

Micromobilization

In their emphasis on organization as the solution to the collective action problem, McCarthy and Zald deflected attention from how individuals make the decision to adhere to a social movement. Dutch social psychologist Bert Klandermans tried to specify the process of adherence around both the propensity to participate and the probability of success. He eventually proposed a funnel of causation in which movement entrepreneurs look for support from within a broad but inert protest potential. This is through what Klandermans called “consensus mobilization,” and it narrows by “action mobilization”; collective action then mounts with the support of a subset of the potential participants who were originally targeted.

Mesomobilization

But who is more likely to mobilize, and whose protest potential remains inert? This depends on more than individual propensities; it also depends on the individual’s location in society. Social movement scholars soon observed that those who decide to engage in collective action do not do so as isolated individuals but from within networks of friends, family, roommates, and workmates. These scholars moved beyond the determined individualism of Olson and his followers to look at how groups themselves induce mobilization. Even in high-risk situations—like French insurrections, freedom summer during the civil rights movement, and the Tiananmen Square protests—participants embedding in social networks encouraged mobilization. For network scholars, the group, rather than being a source of collective action problems, actually helps to move individuals from inertia to mobilization.

Macromobilization

Just as McCarthy and Zald, Klandermans, and the social network theorists were moving beyond Olson from the bottom, other theorists were building downward from a structuralist perspective. Social movement theory emerged in dialogue with Marxism, for which individuals mobilize as the outcome of impersonal macrostructural processes: exploitation, proletarianization, and concentration. States hovered on the margins of these processes, entering abstractly as the “executive committee of the capitalist class” or concretely as the agent of repression. From this mechanical Marxism, historians like E. P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm eventually departed, but it took a historically trained sociologist, Charles Tilly, to specify a number of mechanisms—organization, repression, facilitation, opportunity, threat, and mobilization—to connect the interests of a group with its collective action. A brief comment on each of Tilly’s mechanisms is useful in placing work on the political process alongside the collective action tradition.

Tilly argued that any collective action begins with the interest of a group in acting collectively, which he defined as “the shared advantages or disadvantages likely to accrue to the population in question” as a result of “various possible interactions with other populations.” But interest was just the beginning of Tilly’s model. It continued with organization. More broadly than Olson, Tilly defined organization as “an increase in common identity and/or unifying structure.” Unlike McCarthy and Zald, organization was not the single solution to the collective action problem—once participants left the precincts of the group, organizers encountered other actors, opponents, and the state. They encountered the environment through repression, defined as “any action by another group which raises the contender’s cost of collective action.” But other actors could also facilitate their actions via facilitation, which is “an action which lowers the contender’s cost.” Political repression and political facilitation relate to the relationship between contenders and governments. Repression and facilitation were specific forms of more general encounters, which Tilly summarized with the concepts of opportunity and threat: “the relationship between the population’s interactions with other populations which favour/disfavour its interests in relation to those of others.”

The Political Process Tradition

Tilly’s model launched an entire new stream of social movement research that focused more on the relations between a challenging group and its environment than on the group’s particular gr ievances or its internal relations. Mobilization was at the center of this new paradigm. In contrast to collective action theorists who focused on the problem of internal cooperation, political process theorists emphasized a group’s interaction with the constraints and resources it found in its external environment. If these constraints and resources could be successfully navigated, mobilization resulted, and in Tilly’s terms, “an increase in the resources or in the degree of collective control.”

The most fundamental difference between the political process approach and that of Olson and the post-Olsonians is that in this tradition, it is not the problem of cooperation within a group that is central to mobilization, but the relationship between members of that group and the outside environment. These relationships are channeled through a contender who, on the one hand, seeks to gain control of its internal resources, and, on the other, maneuvers in the external environment to effectively represent the interests of the group. To put this spatially: if the problem of mobilization for Olson and those who followed him was to overcome the obstacle to horizontal cooperation, for Tilly and the political process theorists it was the problem of achieving vertical control of the groups resources by a contender who uses these resources in facing external groups and institutions. In this way, the process of mobilization shifts from an internal process to one that connects the group to its environment as it makes claims on other actors, opponents, and the state.

The nub of the problem lies in how Tilly was interested in all kinds of contentious interactions, and the political process approach that grew out of his work came to focus almost exclusively on the mobilization of one kind of group—social movements—and has largely forsaken the problem of collective action within the group. Except for a few prominent outliers like Samuel Popkin and Dennis Chong, this has led to an increasing gap between the study of collective action internal to groups and the study of the encounter between groups and their external environments. The problem is to blend the insights of the relatively apolitical Olson approach with the more political approaches of political process or contentious politics. Only by doing so can the field interface with the core concerns of comparative politics.

A first step in bridging the two traditions would be for scholars of collective action to be reintroduced to one another. In Ostrom’s otherwise wide-ranging review of collective action in the 1998 American Political Science Association presidential address, there was no recognition of the work on social movements that was simultaneously flowering in the political process tradition. Similarly, in the definitive Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, Olson is cited exactly twice in the index to this 754-page book, Ostrom is never cited, and the collective action problem is not even mentioned.

A second step would be to better specify the mechanisms in the mobilization process that are common to both traditions. Some of these, such as resource transfer from members of a group to the contender that seeks to represent it, are familiar from the collective action tradition but are also recognizable in the work of Klandermans, Tilly, and others. Other mechanisms—including the brokerage of a group’s claims to represent its interests to third parties, allies, and opponents— developed in the contentious politics tradition, but are close to the concept of political entrepreneurship from the work of Frohlich, Oppenheimer, and Young. Still others, such as the way movement contenders frame the formation of claims, derive from the constructivist perspective on social movements, but are compatible with both perspectives.

A third step would be to try to build outward from the political process tradition’s single-minded focus on social movements and inward from the collective action tradition’s tendency to seek collective action solutions to everything, and thus form a bridge between the two traditions. The political process scholars have largely ignored other forms of collective action beyond social movements, like those we encounter in the collective action tradition. In contrast, collective action scholars seek general laws or necessary and sufficient conditions in which solutions to the collective action problems are sought, regardless of the site or the surrounding environment of the population being examined.

There are exceptions to the mutual indifference between collective action theorists and the political process tradition with respect to mobilization. The most prominent is found in the work of Mark Lichbach. In his monumental study The Rebel’s Dilemma, Lichbach deduces four mechanisms of mobilization growing beyond the collective action tradition: market mechanisms, community mechanisms, contractual mechanisms, and hierarchical mechanisms. In a series of articles, he comes closer than any collective action theorist to building a bridge to what he calls “synthetic political opportunity theory.” A second approach, starting from the political process side, is the contentious politics approach, which reaches beyond social movements to study the mechanisms of mobilization in revolutions, strike waves, nationalist episodes, and democratization. While this work does not seek to provide a theory of everything (indeed it deliberately excludes social movements that are not oriented toward public politics), like Lichbach, its proponents seek to identify mechanisms that are present across a range of forms of contention.

These are but the first steps in constructing a theory unifying mobilization and collective action.

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