The private stake in public goods: overcoming the illogic of collective action

Conclusion According to the Logic of Collective Action, most actions in the service of common interests are either not logical or not collective. In a large group, the argument goes, individual action counts for so little in the realization of common interests that it makes no sense for a person to consider group interests when choosing a course of personal conduct. Only private interests are decisive. Their fulfillment, at least, depends in a substantial way on one's own behavior. Individual actions designed to achieve private advantage are therefore rational. Actions aimed at collective goods are a waste of time and effort. Occasionally, of course, a person acting on the basis of private interests may inadvertently provide some collective good from which many other people derive benefit. This is what happens in the case of the Greek shipping tycoon. But it occurs only because one person's private good fortuitously coincides with the collective good of a larger group. From the tycoon's perspective, there are no collective interests at stake in the sponsorship of an opera broadcast, only his own private interests. Nor does his decision to underwrite a broadcast take account of the other people who will listen to it. His action is a solitary one designed to serve a private interest, and it is perfectly consistent with Olson's argument concerning the illogic of collective action, because it is not grounded in collective interest and is not a case of collective behavior. Olson's theory permits people to share collective interests but not to act upon them voluntarily. The only acknowledged exception occurs in the case of very small groups, where each member's contribution to the common good represents such a large share of the total that any person's default becomes noticeable to others and may lead them to reduce or cancel their own contributions. In this instance, at least, one person's actions can make a perceptible difference for the chance of realizing collective interests, and it is therefore sensible for each person to consider these collective interests (and one another's conduct) when deciding whether or not to support group efforts. Outside of small groups, however, Olson finds no circumstances in which voluntary collective action is rational. But in fact the conditions that make collective action rational are broader than this and perhaps more fundamental to Olson's theory. They are inherent in the very ‘collectiveness’ of collective goods - their status as social or group artifacts. In the absence of a group, there can be no such thing as a collective good. But in the absence of mutual awareness and interdependence, it becomes extremely difficult to conceive of a social group. The assumption that group members are uninfluenced by one another's contributions to a collective good is no mere theoretical simplification. It may be a logical impossibility. Being a member of a group, even a very large one, implies at the very least that one's own conduct takes place against a background of group behavior. Olson's assumptions do not acknowledge this minimal connection between individual and group behavior, and they inhibit recognition of the elementary social processes that explain why slovenly conduct attracts special attention on clean streets, or why the initial violations of group norms are more momentous than later violations. It may be argued, of course, that the groups of Olson's theory are not functioning social groups with a collective existence, but only categories or classes of people who happen to share a collective interest. The logic of collective action is intended precisely to show why these ‘potential’ groups are prevented from converting themselves into organized social groups whose members act in a coordinated way. In such latent groups, perhaps, members are unaware of one another, and Olson's assumption that they are uninfluenced by one another's conduct becomes a reasonable one. Another implication, however, is that Olson's theory is subject to unacknowledged restrictions. The logic of the free ride is for potential groups. It may not hold for actual ones. The distinction is exemplified, in the case of public sanitation, by the difference between what is rational on a clean street and what is rational on a dirty one. The logic of the free ride does not make sense for the members of an ongoing group that is already operating to produce collective goods such as public order or public sanitation. While this represents a notable limitation upon the scope of Olson's theory, it apparently leaves the logic of collective action undisturbed where potential or latent groups are concerned. But suppose that a member of an unmobilized group wants her colleagues to contribute to the support of a collective good that she particularly values. Her problem is to create a situation in which such contributions make sense to her fellow members. As we have already seen in the case of the neighborhood street-sweeper, one possible solution is to provide the collective good herself. If it has the appropriate characteristics, its very existence may induce other members of the latent group to contribute to its maintenance. This is not one of those cases in which one person's private interest fortuitously coincides with the collective interest of a larger group. The neighborhood street-sweeper is acting on behalf of an interest that she is conscious of sharing with her neighbors. Her aim is to arouse collective action in support of that interest. She does not expect to pay for public cleanliness all by herself, or to enjoy its benefits all by herself. Her role bears a general resemblance to the one that some analysts have defined for the political entrepreneur who seeks to profit personally by supplying a collective good to the members of a large group (Frohlich, Oppenheimer, and Young 1971). Like the neighborhood street-sweeper, the entrepreneur finds it advantageous to confer a collective benefit on others. But the similarity does not extend to the nature of the advantage or the manner in which it is secured. The entrepreneur induces people to contribute toward the cost of a collective good by creating an organizational apparatus through which group members can pool their resources. The existence of this collection mechanism can also strengthen individual members' confidence that their colleagues' contributions are forthcoming. What the entrepreneur gains is private profit - the difference between the actual cost of a collective good and the total amount that group members are prepared to pay for it. By contrast, the neighborhood street-sweeper induces support for a collective good, not by facilitating contributions, but by increasing the costs that come from the failure to contribute. As a result of her efforts, she gains a clean street whose benefits (and costs) she shares with her fellow residents. She takes her profit in the form of collective betterment rather than private gain, and her conduct, along with the behavior of her neighbors, demonstrates that effective selfinterest can extend beyond private interest. Self-interest can also give rise to continuing cooperative relationships. The street-sweeper, acting in her own interest, brings into being a cooperative enterprise in which she and her fellow residents jointly contribute to the production of a collective good. Cooperation in this case does not come about through negotiation or exchange among equal parties. It can be the work of a single actor who contributes the lion's share of the resources needed to establish a collective good, in the expectation that its existence will induce others to join in maintaining it. The tactic is commonplace as a means of eliciting voluntary collective action, and it operates on a scale far larger than the street or the neighborhood. Government, paradoxically, probably relies on it more than most institutions With its superior power and resources, it may be society's most frequent originator of voluntary collective action. Its policies, imposed through coercion and financed by compulsory taxation, generate a penumbra of cooperation without which coercion might become ineffectual. By providing certain collective goods, government authorities can move citizens to make voluntary contributions to the maintenance of these goods. The stark dichotomy between private voluntary action and public coercion - one of the mainstays of American political rhetoric - may be as misleading as the identification of self-interest with selfishness. There is more at stake here than the voluntary production of collective goods. Continuing cooperative behavior can have other results as well. Once group members begin to expect cooperation from one another, norms of cooperation and fairness are likely to develop. Axelrod (1986) has suggested that modes of conduct which have favorable outcomes for the people who pursue them tend to evolve into group norms. Public-spirited action that serves self-interest could therefore engender a principled attachment to the common good, undermining the assumption of self-interestedness that gives the logic of collective action its bite. Laboratory studies of cooperative behavior have already demonstrated that experimental subjects have far less regard for narrow self-interest than rational choice theory requires (Dawes 1980). In one extended series of collective action experiments, however, Marwell and Ames (1981) found a single group of subjects who approximated the self-interested free-riders of Olson's theory. They were graduate students in economics.     

Pursuing the common goods: An economic theory of collective action among NGOs in transnational advocacy

This article integrates previous research on NGO behaviour with economic theory on collective action to create a generalizable and predictive model of advocacy campaign growth. It identifies three types of goods which NGOs may pursue in advocacy: unlimited, non-rival (public) goods; rival and excludable (private) goods; and rival but non-excludable goods. It then models an individual NGO’s decision to (not) join an existing advocacy campaign using a cost-benefit analysis conditioned by the presence or absence of competition for the good(s) sought by the NGO. This model of individual behaviour forms the basis for predicting collective action among NGOs with varying cost structures and pursuing a variety of rival and non-rival goods. The theory is illustrated using two cases of NGOs campaigning on World Bank policy.     

The United States,Japan, and the power to block: the APEC and AMF cases

This paper argues that the evolution of APEC and the rejection of Japan's 1997 AMF proposal reflect a failure of Japanese and US leadership. Not only have the two countries failed to exercise either individual or shared regional leadership. Instead, both have used their considerable structural power negatively to block the other's proposals for regional collective action, rather than positively to exercise leadership. After developing the concepts of leadership and blocking power, the paper provides case studies of the APEC and AMF. It concludes that if a post-hegemonic US no longer has the willingness and/or the ability to undertake collective action single-handedly, and if in a post-Cold War world neither the US nor Japan has sufficient incentives to bridge their differences and sacrifice some interests to achieve a unified stance, then continued stalemate and under-supply of regional collective goods can be expected.     

Charitable giving in the German welfare state: fiscal incentives and crowding out

There are two ways that government activities influence private charitable giving: (1) government spending on the provision of public goods may cause crowding out of private charitable contributions; and (2) tax incentives may boost private charitable giving. From a sample of German income tax returns, we estimate the elasticity of charitable giving relative to tax incentives, income, and government spending. Using censored quantile regression analysis, we derive results for different points of the underlying distribution of charitable giving. Evaluating overall treasury efficiency, the tax deductibility of charitable donations fosters enough private giving to offset foregone tax revenues.     

On collective goods,private wealth,and the core solution of simple games with sidepayments

This essay identifies consequences for the core solution in a class of social decision problems concerning the provision of collective goods (or bads) if the rules are modified to permit sidepayments. In these problems, a kind of formal decision procedure that includes any weighted or unweighted majority rule governs only the decision about collective goods. Each decision about collective goods, however, implies a vector of the agents' endowments of private wealth that can, but need not, vary across the alternatives. Any agent may offer to make sidepayments from this endowment that are contingent on the collective goods decision, but the agent holds preferences that, given any fixed decision about collective goods, strictly increase in the agent's own wealth. The results indicate that the core's response to introducing the possibility of sidepayments depends on whether any agent possesses a veto over the collective goods decision. If no one has a veto, then an outcome belongs to the core of the game with sidepayments only if no sidepayment is made and the same decision about collective goods belongs to the core of the associated game without sidepayments. In this case, introducing the possibility of sidepayments does not bring a new collective goods decision into the core. Indeed, merely adding the possibility of sidepayments can cause the core to vanish. On the other hand, if at least one agent possesses a veto, then introducing sidepayments can (but need not) lead to a new core solution concerning the decision about collective goods. In any such new solution, at least one agent who has a veto — but no one who lacks it — receives a sidepayment.     

Globalization and the Retreat of Citizen Participation in Collective Action: A Challenge for Public Administration

Globalization challenges the ability of contemporary public administration to encourage citizen participation in collective action through behaviors such as tax compliance and contributions to public goods. The authors introduce a new individual‐level approach to globalization, arguing that people vary in the extent to which they are globalized and that an individual's level of globalism (ILG) reflects attitudes and dispositions that influence the way he or she resolves the social dilemma of participation in collective action (i.e., the decision to contribute versus follow a “free‐ride” strategy). Using a four‐country sample, the article examines the relationship between ILG and collective action participation decisions in three behavioral experiments. Findings support the hypothesis that regardless of country‐level globalization, a more globalized individual complies less willingly with tax codes, donates less to local nongovernmental organizations, and prefers to adopt a free‐ride strategy in a public goods game. The consequences for public administration are discussed.     

The Three Exit, Three Voice and Loyalty Framework: A Test with Survey Data on Local Services

The article presents a modified Hirschman framework with three types of exit: moving location; moving from the public to a private sector provider; and moving between public sector providers; and three types of voice: private voice (complaining about private goods); voting; and collective action. Seven hypotheses are generated from this framework. The article then presents evidence from the first round of an online survey examining citizen satisfaction with public services and the relationship between exit and voice opportunities. We find dissatisfied people are more likely to complain privately, vote and engage in other forms of collective participation; but only a weak relationship exists between dissatisfaction and geographical exit. We find some evidence that the exit–voice trade-off might exist as more alert consumers are more likely to move from the public to the private sector and those 'locked in' are more likely to complain than those who have outside options. Overall the results tend to corroborate the hypotheses drawn from the modified Hirschman framework.     

Exclusivity of citizens’ initiatives: Fuel for collective action?

ABSTRACT

Self-organized citizens’ initiatives are a form of collective action and contribute to society through the production of public goods and services. Traditional collective action theory predicts that such initiatives are near impossible because of the persistent problems of free-riding. Citizens’ initiatives however do exist and function properly, and their numbers seem to be increasing in countries such as the Netherlands. This article argues that free-riding problems can be overcome when some form of exclusivity is arranged in citizens’ initiatives. We assume that citizens’ initiatives use active and/or passive strategies to limit free-riding behaviour. Using three illustrative cases, our research shows that position rules, boundary rules, and authority rules are used in a subtle and often implicit way to differentiate the level of influence and authority between the more and the less committed members, enabling collective action. Such rules, though advantageous, may be paradoxical to the goals of the citizens’ initiatives and can undermine the virtues associated with them.     

Revealed preferences for public goods: Applying a model of voter behavior

Most analyses of preferences for government-supplied goods disregard the fact that in a democratic society, these preferences are revealed by an individual choice: the vote. In this paper this is taken account of in a model, explaining the dynamics in voting behavior in a multi-party system. The model assumes that voters may be categorized into K groups of individuals, pursuing the same interests, who remember how parties do in representing these interests (given the level to which they are held responsible for government policy). The model allows one to estimate party identification, sensitiveness to economic performances, time preference, and relative preferences for public versus private goods, all for each of the groups. Furthermore, the model allows for an estimation of the level to which various parties are held responsible for government policies.An empirical application of the model to the Netherlands is presented, albeit that data restrictions did not allow a distinction of more than one group. The results in terms of significance of the coefficients as well as the interpretation of the original parameters are promising. The two main conclusions are that the relative preference for private versus collective consumption is lower than the existing ratio in the Netherlands, and that two parties forming a government coalition are not held equally responsible for the policies.     

European Cooperation on Future Crises: Toward a Public Good?

As crises grow more transnational in origin and effect, managing them effectively will require international cooperation. This article explores the dilemmas inherent to producing common crisis management capacities across national governments. Drawing on the literature related to "international public goods," the article builds an approach for understanding these dilemmas through the lens of collective action and the perverse incentives associated therein. The article applies this approach to cooperation in Europe on an issue that typifies the transnational crisis—the spread of communicable disease—and highlights obstacles to European Union ambitions to build a robust system for disease surveillance and control. Having isolated the obstacles, the article then identifies solutions to facilitate cooperation toward more effectively producing the good in question.     

Using threshold models to explain international relations

The outcome of political opposition or revolution is a public good, which suggests that free riding will diminish the effectiveness of these forms of collective action. The private gains from contributing to collective goals are increased, however, if individuals place some value on ideological conformity or group identity. Nevertheless, some external stimulus is often needed to set in motion a tendency toward social motivation that is strong enough to outweigh the free rider incentive. This paper investigates the extent to which international pressure and demonstration effects can serve to signal support for the objectives of domestic groups in a target country and thereby mobilize collective action in pursuit of their goals. It is of interest to know not only the extent to which inherent barriers to effective collective action are overcome by outside support, but also to show how foreign economic policy can have an impact on political processes in the target country even when that policy itself has minimal economic effects.     

Collective Action for Smallholder Market Access: Evidence and Implications for Africa

It is widely acknowledged that the involvement of small farmers into markets can contribute to higher productivity and income growth, which in turn can enhance food security, poverty reduction efforts, and overall economic growth. In Africa, as in other parts of the developing world, agricultural production systems and their participants face significant challenges as a result of changing economic, environmental, and sociopolitical context. New dynamics in the global agricultural economy, such as the growth of supermarkets, are providing smallholders with both the new opportunities and new constraints to participate in and benefit from market exchanges. Collective action in the form of producer groups can enable African smallholders to take advantage of the new value chains and deal with existing market imperfections. However, certain conditions must be in place to create and sustain incentives for farmers to organize around marketing. Experiences from collective action in natural resource management (NRM) have shown that the types of markets and products, characteristics of user groups, institutional arrangements, and external environment need to be considered in order to determine the effectiveness and sustainability of collective marketing for smallholders. This paper applies the lessons from collective action in NRM to marketing, using existing case studies of producer groups in Africa, and offers policy recommendations on the factors that contribute to the success of collective marketing efforts.     

Sources of Authoritarian Responsiveness: A Field Experiment in China

A growing body of research suggests that authoritarian regimes are responsive to societal actors, but our understanding of the sources of authoritarian responsiveness remains limited because of the challenges of measurement and causal identification. By conducting an online field experiment among 2,103 Chinese counties, we examine factors that affect officials' incentives to respond to citizens in an authoritarian context. At baseline, we find that approximately one‐third of county governments respond to citizen demands expressed online. Threats of collective action and threats of tattling to upper levels of government cause county governments to be considerably more responsive, whereas identifying as loyal, long‐standing members of the Chinese Communist Party does not increase responsiveness. Moreover, we find that threats of collective action make local officials more publicly responsive. Together, these results demonstrate that top‐down mechanisms of oversight as well as bottom‐up societal pressures are possible sources of authoritarian responsiveness.     

Interest groups and social media: An examination of cause and sectional groups' social media strategies in the EU

This paper examines social media use by cause and sectional interest groups in the European Union. The literature suggests that cause groups should focus on building a constituency more than sectional groups, because they do not offer exclusive benefits to their members. Cause groups face collective action problems more than sectional groups, so they have to take a proactive approach to community building. The nature of the causes cause groups lobby for is also more suitable for protest and thus calls to action. An in‐depth analysis of a random sample of 1,000 tweets by cause and sectional groups reveals differences with respect to social media use. Cause groups use social media to pursue two‐way communication with the public slightly—albeit not significantly—more than sectional groups. Cause groups mobilise the public to take action significantly and substantively more than specific interests.     

Public Regulation and Private Lawsuits in the American Separation of Powers System

This article investigates causes of the legislative choice to mobilize private litigants to enforce statutes. It specifies the statutory mechanism, grounded in economic incentives, that Congress uses to do so, and presents a theoretical framework for understanding how certain characteristics of separation of powers structures, particularly conflict between Congress and the president over control of the bureaucracy, drive legislative production of this mechanism. Using new and original historical data, the article presents the first empirical model of the legislative choice to mobilize private litigants, covering the years 1887 to 2004. The findings provide robust support for the proposition that interbranch conflict between Congress and the president is a powerful cause of congressional enactment of incentives to mobilize private litigants. Higher risk of electoral losses by the majority party, Democratic control of Congress, and demand by issue‐oriented interest groups are also significant predictors of congressional enactment of such incentives.     

Does the Network Centrality of Government Actors Matter? Examining the Role of Government Organizations in Aquaculture Partnerships

The growth in the use of collaborative governance arrangements has been accompanied by burgeoning scholarship in the field of public affairs that seeks to understand the benefits of engaging diverse stakeholders in common venues. However, few scholars have formally assessed the role of government actors in facilitating outcomes for individual participants in such efforts. Moreover, little work on collaborative governance examines how individual incentives and barriers to collective action are formed within the nested nature of these contexts. We contribute to the study of collaborative governance by formally investigating how the relative centrality of government actors in collaborative policy‐making venues affects individual relationship building and learning for participants therein. We find that government actor centrality is positively associated with relationship building and learning. However, in testing two different conceptualizations of “centrality,” we find that the definition of this construct clearly matters.     

What does it take for a roving bandit settle down? Theory and an illustrative history of the Visigoths

A roving bandit provides exclusive (rivalrous) collective goods to members of its in-group. A stationary bandit further provides inclusive (non-rivalrous; public) collective goods to the out-group. The inclusive goods are an input to the production of the exclusive goods enjoyed by the in-group. As such, the transition from roving to stationary bandit is likely to involve the redefinition of the in-group, its collective interest, and the type of goods that it provides. To illustrate these points, I employ a case study of the roving Visigothic confederacy as it evolved during the fourth and fifth centuries towards the stationary Visigothic Kingdom. The illustration provides insights into why competition amongst roving bandits does not always (or often) lead to the emergence of a non-predatory state.     

Professional associations and the free rider problem: The case of optometry

Political influence by a professional association, like the influence of any special interest group, is a collective good for the members of the profession. This paper investigates the variables affecting the ability of state optometric associations to overcome the free rider problem and induce optometrists to join the association. Although the empirical results show little evidence that organization costs are reduced by concentration in urban areas, the results do strongly support the hypothesis that there will be less free riding in smaller groups. The results also support the hypothesis that selective incentives enable latent groups to overcome the free rider problem. By providing continuing education at reduced fees to members of the association, optometric associations have increased the percentage of optometrists who are association members in those states with statutory continuing education requirements.     

Why societies need public goods

The most distinctive features of public goods are usually understood to be the difficulty of excluding potential beneficiaries and the fact that one appropriator’s benefits do not diminish the amount of benefits left for others. Yet, because of these properties (non-excludability and non-rivalry), public goods cause market failures and contribute to problems of collective action. This article aims to portray public goods in a different light. Following a recent reassessment of public goods in political philosophy, this contribution argues that public goods are particularly suitable for sustaining a well-ordered society. Public goods contribute to social inclusion, they support the generation of the public, and they strengthen a shared sense of citizenship. This article scrutinizes these functions of public goods and offers a discussion of the interventionist thesis which states that governments should sustain public goods.     

Incentives for separation and incentives for public good provision

In this paper, I examine how the incentives of regions to unite and to separate are related to the incentives to provide public goods. Separation allows for greater influence over the nature of political decision making while unification allows regions to exploit economies of scale in the provision of public goods. From a social welfare perspective, there are excessive incentives for separation and for the provision of public goods. When incentives for public good provision are not taken into account, however, these incentives can be misinterpreted as incentives for separation.