Evaluate the “logic of collective action” and challenges to cooperation
Analyze the different factors that can facilitate collective action
The Logic of Collective Action
As Luis Medina has noted, “A group can create power through coordination,” (2007, p. 4). Collective action hinges on coordination and cooperation, and political scientists have employed many frameworks and utilized the tools of game theory to explore the conditions under which collective action occurs as well as when that action is likely to be successful.
One of the most influential frameworks for understanding collective action is given in Mancur Olson’s The Logic of Collective Action (1965). Olson argues that collective action failures are to be expected given rational and self-interested individuals. Such individuals are disinclined to organize and contribute to the production of a public or collective good because each individual has incentives to stand by and let others do the hard work of achieving the goal, then enjoy the fruits of that collective good once provided. This is known as the free rider problem. Through this logic, Olson establishes the challenges to successful collective action.
Consider the example of climate change. Collective action in the form of everyone reducing their carbon footprint would yield an abatement of this problem. Yet a single country or an individual has weak incentives to reduce their carbon footprint for several reasons. A country’s leaders might reason, “If we reduce our carbon emissions through a carbon tax, that might dampen economic growth. Our constituents won’t like that, and that might hurt our global competitiveness.” Or an individual might think, “Let everyone else reduce their consumption, I’ll keep buying lots of stuff, driving cars and taking planes and eating excessive amounts of animal protein. After all, What difference do my actions make? And if enough of everyone else changes their lifestyles, I can enjoy a healthier planet then, without sacrificing any of my comforts!” The logic here is to freeride on the efforts of others, knowing that the benefits of others' work will apply to everyone regardless of their contributions. This behavior and thinking creates a free rider problem, where individuals are incentivized to refrain from contributing toward the provision of a collective good because they know they can eventually enjoy the benefits of that good if others work toward providing it. This problem raises issues of fairness but even worse, a collective good may not be produced if enough people adopt a free rider mentality.
Beyond the free rider problem, there are challenges to collective action because it hinges on cooperation. The challenges to cooperation are well-illustrated through a simple and eponymous game, the so-called Prisoner’s Dilemma, which illustrates the urge to free ride or “defect” in a situation where cooperation by all would yield better outcomes for all. Yet defection yields better than worst-case individual-level outcomes, so it ends up being the outcome, albeit a sub-optimal one. The set-up for this kind of cooperation game is simple but a powerful illustration of challenges to cooperative endeavors. Imagine two children, Person Y and Person Z, who have taken cookies from the cookie jar at home -- without asking and while no one was looking -- but were then asked about the missing cookies by a parent. There is enough evidence (the missing cookies) to punish the children for their transgression but not enough proof of a more serious crime (such as repeated taking of cookies from the cookie jar, over the course of months of distracted parenting) to extend their punishment. The interrogating parent pressures each child to offer damning evidence of the other’s guilt. What should each do?
As with all games, each player has a set of choices. To keep things simple, they can either stay silent (cooperate) or betray their partner in the cookie-sneaking business. The combination of possible outcomes to this game are the following: both stay silent; one stays silent while the other betrays; or both betray. In this game set-up, there are potential punishments for each outcome. If both stay silent, they receive the lightest of possible punishments, a week without video games. If one stays silent but the other talks, then the betrayer gets zero punishment while the betrayed receives a long punishment of three weeks without video games. In this scenario, one player enjoys the best individual outcome but the other player suffers the worst individual outcome. If both decide to betray the other, then both go aren’t allowed video games for two weeks. A summary of these outcomes is given in the payoff matrix below.
A summary of the payoffs to a standard cooperation game. In each box, the first number indicates the punishment for Person Y and the second number indicates the punishment for Person Z (in weeks without video games).
Payoff: Person Y, Person Z
Z stays silent
Z betrays
Y stays silent
-1, -1
-3, 0
Y betrays
0, -3
-2, -2
This framework illustrates the interdependent nature of the game and weak incentives for cooperation. Each individual, in considering these payoffs, sees the immediate personal gain to betrayal. They know that staying silent would be the best for all, but they still have strong incentives to betray because staying silent means putting themselves at risk for the worst possible punishment. The expected outcome is both choosing to betray the other, and both suffering worse outcomes than if they had cooperated with one another. This result is suboptimal for all. Note that there is a cost to pay for cooperating, too. This is the case for engaging in collective action: to participate is to donate some resource such as one’s time or other resources.
To apply this game to a collective action scenario, imagine playing this game across more than two individuals, for example with one hundred or even millions of players, and the problems of coordination and cooperation become evident. And while this game may seem artificial and overly simplistic, we see the dynamics of this cooperation game playing out in the real world. To take up the example of climate change again, we can replace the children’s choices with the following: staying silent (cooperating) is equivalent to making lifestyle changes to lighten one’s carbon footprint, while betrayal is equivalent to keeping a heavy carbon footprint. Viewed in this way, individuals’ choices and individual-level outcomes make sense as well as the overall outcome for society. Such cooperation challenges are also evident beyond the individual level. For countries, staying silent is equivalent to a government adopting major climate change mitigation policies, while betrayal is equivalent to doing nothing to address climate change.
While this simple cooperation game can highlight some of the costs and dynamics underlying strategic interactions that inform collective action, it is an imperfect means for capturing all the complexity of the social world. Cooperation may be challenging and costly in some ways, but it happens all the time. People participate in collective action because they are true believers in a cause (not captured in this game) or because they have meaningful relationships and social ties with others. Persons Y and Z may have a deep friendship and bonds of trust, something not reflected by the payoff structure given in the game, and this might affect their willingness to cooperate.
Factors promoting collective action
Cooperation can be costly. The Logic of Collective Action highlights important barriers to coordinated action. Yet Olson’s argument and the logic of the cooperation game discussed above should not be taken to mean that collective action is impossible. On the contrary, we observe it frequently in the social world.
The free rider problem, and the barrier it poses to collective action, can be resolved when a group is sufficiently organized. This is usually more likely for smaller groups, for example coordination and cooperation across all the firms in a given industry or united action by all the activists in a given geographical region. Economist Elinor Ostrom, who dedicated her Nobel Prize-winning career to understanding the dynamics of collective action, observed the power of smaller groups with unifying interests: “Mobs, gangs, and cartels are forms of collective action as well as neighborhood associations, charities, and voting,” (2009b). Olson’s framework suggests that collective action is most likely to take place by groups with concentrated interests, where the effort expended is more likely to yield significant gains for each participant. This is what we observe with interest group lobbying in many wealthy democracies today.
Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): The logic of collective action holds that collective action is most likely to be organized by special interest groups. In 2013, environmental groups in Vancouver, Canada, pitted themselves against corporate agricultural interests on whether to permit genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in the food supply. (Source: March Against Monsanto Vancouver by Rosalee Yagihara viawikimedia is licensed under CC BY 2.0)
Collective action is also more likely when each individual participant anticipates some potential gain from exerting the effort to participate. Additional organizational factors can encourage collective action, such as the existence of competent leaders or a federated structure where smaller units contribute to a larger whole. It also matters when participants know each other, which raises the level of accountability for any proposed action.
Others, such as Thomas Schelling, have noted that the barriers to collective action are not quite as high as proposed by Olson. Collective action is possible when rational and self-interested individuals have reasonable expectations that others will join the movement. This can happen when there is something around which individuals can signal to each other that they are willing to join the movement. It can be wearing a certain color or seeing a certain number of people subscribed to an organizing website. Hence collective action can often be observed in seemingly sudden moments of rapid change, when everyone is joining the movement because they feel like many others around them are also in the movement.
This framework has its limits because it does not explain who or what is the spark that starts the collective action. One of the most elegant and intuitive frameworks for understanding the process of collective action is given by Timur Kuran in the article “Now Out of Never.” In this framework, individuals are moved to act when they reach their individual threshold for tolerance on an issue and are moved to act. In a collective action situation, there are thus “first movers” who have the strongest preferences for change. These initial movers then create the initial momentum whereby the actions of one or a few cascade socially and others join. For example, individuals in a society have different tolerances for the effects of climate change. Some individuals want to see change immediately -- and are publicly agitating for those changes or making more quiet personal adjustments -- while others are quite tolerant of the real and projected consequences of climate change and see no need to act. Kuran’s framework is powerful for connecting the individual-level psychology of collective action with what we observe in the streets.
Circling back to the simple cooperation game described above, scholars have also considered the implications of different variations on the game. What might happen if the game is repeated, which is the case for many scenarios in the world, where we see the same people again and again? This holds true for roommate situations and workplaces, all the way to negotiations between diplomats on high stakes policy issues. Kreps et al. have argued convincingly that when a cooperation game such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma is repeated, players will eventually settle on a strategy of cooperation rather than the non-cooperation we observe when the game is played once.
Elinor Ostrom observed cooperative communities around the world to explore the conditions under which communities are able, over centuries in some cases, to preserve and sustain common pool resources such as irrigation canals, forests, and fisheries. Across her observations, she found that certain organizing principles may create an institutional framework which encourages sustainable collective management of resources. Organizing principles for sustainable collective action include collective decision-making, active monitoring of the shared resource, widely understood and enforced punishments for violations, and effective conflict resolution procedures. Bonds of trust between community members are integral for supporting these long-term arrangements.
Figure \(\PageIndex{2}\): Collective action can lead to the sustainable management of forests such as these near Manaslu, Nepal. (Source:Nepal by ydylg via flickr creative commons is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
In short, there exist many logics of collective action. While there exist barriers to collective action, such as group size, the temptation to free ride, and incentives for non-cooperation, there are also conditions under which collective action takes place. Instances of successful collective action can produce desired outcomes such as public goods and sustained stewardship of natural resources. Understanding the conditions under which collective action is possible continues to be critical for organizing the people and resources to address global and community-level challenges which still plague us.
