'All for One and One for All': Transactions Cost and Collective Action

Rational choice analysis of collective action predicts that individual members of a large group will not contribute voluntarily towards a common cause; members of large groups attribute no significance to individual action. Large groups are mobilised by the attraction of private goods and services; private interest, rather than identity with a common cause, is the stimulus. Yet the efficacy of such selective incentives depends on the signal that erstwhile 'profits' (from the provision of private goods) are dedicated to achieving a collective goal. At the same time, the signal that collective action is 'non-profit' enhances the intrinsic value of the act of participation. When the impact of individual action on outcome is difficult to discern, individuals rely on low-cost signals relating to process . There are incentives to identify with the pursuit of a common cause when collective action is deemed 'non-profit' and a common goal is non-rival.     

Motivation Crowding and the Federal Civil Servant: Evidence from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service

ABSTRACT

Pay-for-performance reforms create “high-powered” incentives for civil servants to meet or exceed specified performance objectives as measured by such things as customer satisfaction. Economists and social psychologists have advanced the claim that high-powered incentives for performance may empirically lessen the effect of civil servants' intrinsic motivation toward achieving agency goals (motivation can be “crowded out”). Nonetheless, well-designed pay-for-performance incentives may “crowd in” intrinsic motivation. A number of federal agencies and subagencies have undergone personnel management reforms that raise the specter of this pattern of “motivation crowding.” Does it happen? Is intrinsic motivation crowded in or crowded out? This paper employs item response theory to create measurement models for the estimation a latent trait of intrinsic motivation for employees of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) using data from the 2002 Federal Human Capital Survey. The IRS, but not the OCC, implemented a paybanding system that imposed high-powered performance incentives on supervisors, but not on non-supervisory personnel. Results suggest that the IRS reward structure crowded in intrinsic motivation at the lowest levels, but that at the highest levels of motivation intrinsic motivation is crowded out, a pattern not seen in the OCC data.     

国有企业改制中的工人集体行动的解释框架--以西北某省X市H纺织公司的一场抗争为例

20世纪90年代后期以产权为导向的国有企业改制从根本上改变了中国工人的命运.集体无行动和集体行动理论为分析当代中国工人抗争提供了两种十分鲜明的视角.集体无行动理论认为传统意识形态的灌输、工人阶级分裂性特点和政府制度性补救等措施消解了工人的有组织行动.结合发生于西北某省的一个大型纺织公司工人的一次集体抗争来观察中国国企改革困境及中国工人的抗争策略.急剧恶化的生存现实、相对剥夺感的不断强化以及改制中的种种不公正导致工人的抗争运动越来越激烈,用集体无行动理论已经无法解释现实.我们认为尽管这些抗争在手段和策略上还很不成熟,尽管它离西方意义上的社会运动还有距离,但它已经具备了集体行动的特点,符合西方集体行动理论的解释框架.这些抗争行动要求我们必须更理性探索劳动关系新模式,在政府、资本和劳工三方之间达成新的共识.     

The limits and rewards of political opportunism: How electoral timing affects the outcome of currency crises

Politicians are often assumed to be opportunistic. This article examines both whether there is a limit to this opportunism and whether voters reward policy makers for opportunistic behaviour. By looking at currency crisis situations, the article presents a graphic rational opportunistic political business cycle model in which incumbents face a tradeoff between their wish to signal competence and the economic constraints imposed by the crisis. It analyses how electoral incentives affect policy makers' management of currency crises and how this management in turn affects the subsequent election outcome. The empirical results of probit models with selection using a sample of 122 crises in 48 industrial and developing countries between 1983 and 2003 confirm the model's prediction that under certain circumstances some types of policy makers do indeed have incentives to deviate from optimal policy in the run-up to elections – and that voters reward this behaviour by re-electing policy makers who follow such strategies. However, there is a limit to the readiness to manipulate: when speculative pressure is too severe, incumbents no longer manipulate policy but implement the least painful policy option instead.     

Grappling with the “real politics” of systemic corruption: Theoretical debates versus “real‐world” functions

A growing body of research argues that anticorruption efforts fail because of a flawed theoretical foundation, where collective action theory is said to be a better lens for understanding corruption than the dominant principal–agent theory. We unpack this critique and advance several new arguments. First, the application of collective action theory to the issue of corruption has been, thus far, incomplete. Second, a collective action theory‐based approach to corruption is in fact complementary to a principal–agent approach, rather than contradictory as is claimed. Third, applications of both theories have failed to recognize that corruption persists because it functions to provide solutions to problems. We conclude by arguing that anticorruption effectiveness is difficult to achieve because it requires insights from all three perspectives—principal–agent theory, collective action theory, and corruption as serving functions—which allows us to better understand how to harness the political will needed to fight corruption.     

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.     

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.     

Constraints, states, and wars

Abstract. The rational choice assumption is already disputable at the individual level of decisionmaking. At the level of collective decision-making unitary rational action is an unrealistic assumption. It neglects the transitivity of collective preferences issue, the logic of collective action and freeriding, the agency problem, and the human tendency to agree with each other irrespective of the facts. While unitary rational action is rejected as a basis for theorizing on international relations and war, the idea of decision-making under constraints seems as valid in the interstate context as in economics. The most important constraints on national security decision-making are the anarchical character of the international system and the corresponding need for self-help, the security and the territorial delimitation dilemmas, the presence or absence of plausible blueprints for victory, and the presence or absence of domestic constraints on bellicosity. A simple explanatory model of war built on these ideas is suggested and tested with dyadic data for the 1962–1980 period. In addition, there is some discussion of why collective security is doomed to fail, and why hegemony rather than balance improve the prospects of peace.     

When groups contribute to a public good: The importance of institutional framework for making collective decisions

In this paper I discuss how the institutional framework for making collective decisions influences the outcome of a game where groups contribute to a public good. Representative democracy invites each group to act strategically in the election of representatives. I show that this strategic effect reinforces “the tragedy of the common.” The society — all groups taken together — has therefore incentives to restrict groups from making collective decisions through a system of representation.     

Managing Employee Motivation: Exploring the Connections Between Managers’ Enforcement Actions,Employee Perceptions,and Employee Intrinsic Motivation

A number of studies show that the use of external interventions such as command systems and economic incentives can decrease employee intrinsic motivation. Our knowledge of why the size of “the hidden cost of rewards” differs among organizations is, however, still sparse. In this article, we analyze whether local managers—the primary enforcers of external interventions—affect how employees perceive a command system and thereby affect employee intrinsic motivation. Using a multilevel dataset of 1,190 teachers and 32 school principals, we test whether principals’ use of “hard,” “mixed,” or “soft” actions to enforce a command system (obligatory teacher-produced student plans) is associated with teacher intrinsic motivation. Results show that teachers experiencing “hard” enforcement actions have lower intrinsic motivation than teachers experiencing “soft” enforcement actions. As expected by motivation crowding theory, part of this association is mediated by teachers’ student plan requirement perception. These findings support the motivation crowding argument that employee intrinsic motivation depend on the employees’ need for self-determination.     

Endogenous Beliefs in Models of Politics

In the standard rational choice model, actors have exogenously given beliefs that perfectly match objective probabilities. As such, these beliefs cannot be optimistic or motivated by preferences, even though substantial empirical evidence indicates that human beliefs routinely satisfy neither of these criteria. I present a tractable Endogenous Beliefs Model and apply it to three different political environments from across the subfields of political science. In the model, players form beliefs that maximize a utility function that represents preferences over outcomes and the anticipatory experience of uncertainty. Applications include voter turnout, taxation and collective choice, and crisis bargaining. The model captures the empirical evidence about belief formation much better than the standard model. Moreover, these applications show how rigidly insisting on the standard rational choice model rejects otherwise reasonable explanations by fiat, precisely because of its implausible assumptions about beliefs.     

Explaining collective action with rational models

We note the failure of a rational egoist model of human behavior to generate successful predictions of important economic and political behaviors including collective action. Alternative models are presented that combine rational, utility-maximizing features with concerns about collective welfare. The performance of these models in explaining contributing behavior in an experimentally-induced public goods game is compared to the performance of a rational egoist and collective welfare model. The results indicate that a model in which subjects are presumed to trade off benefits to self with benefits to others provides a better explanation of actual contributing behavior than either the rational egoist or collective welfare models, but still explains only a small amount of the individual variance in contributing behavior.The Institute for Political Economy, Utah State University provided important financial support for this study. Donald Cundy, Alan Huston, Joe Oppenheimer, John Orbell, and Randy Simmons provided valuable comments on earlier drafts.     

Phantom Counterfactuals

Researchers often seek to identify the effects of a treatment on a sequence of behaviors, such as whether citizens register to vote and whether they then cast ballots. I show that average treatment effects (ATEs) are only identified until the first behavior (registering to vote) that affects the set of possible subsequent actions (voting). When one action changes the set of possible subsequent actions, it creates ‘phantom counterfactuals,’ or undefined potential outcomes, which render ATEs unidentified. I show that applied theory allows researchers to diagnose phantom counterfactuals, which helps to recognize unidentified ATEs and focus instead on other estimands that are identified. I illustrate this approach using a stylized model of crime reporting, showing how different theories generate different sets of identified estimands while holding constant an experimental design. I thereby establish the necessity of applied theory for causal identification in empirical research with sequential behavioral outcomes.     

Self-enforcing norms and efficient non-cooperative collective action in the provision of public goods

We show how norms can solve the distributional conflict inside a group in an anarchic environment and yield efficient coordination of collective action in a conflict with an external competitor. The equilibrium of the fully non-cooperative game with finite horizon has two interesting features. First, one of the players assumes a central role that resembles the role of the ??big-man?? in some primitive stateless societies. Second, the group members?? contributions to collective output and the payments from the big-man to these members seemingly look like reciprocal behavior, even though they are driven by narrowly selfish preferences.     

Public management reform and organizational performance: An empirical assessment of the U.K. Labour government's public service improvement strategy

We present the first empirical assessment of the U.K. Labour government's program of public management reform. This reform program is based on rational planning, devolution and delegation, flexibility and incentives, and enhanced choice. Measures of these variables are tested against external and internal indicators of organizational performance. The setting for the study is upper tier English local governments, and data are drawn from a multiple informant survey of 117 authorities. The statistical results indicate that planning, organizational flexibility, and user choice are associated with higher performance. Conclusions are drawn for the theory and practice of public management reform. © 2006 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management     

The Political Economy of State Failure: A Social Contract Approach

By employing the contract approach of state theory, this article provides a conceptual framework for the analysis of state failure phenomena which puts the emphasis on structural conditions as the root cause of state fragility and state failure. The article argues that the deep social fragility of some post-colonial societies, augmented by self-serving external interventions by foreign powers, is at the heart of their failure. Deep social fragility makes societies unable to cooperate and thus renders them powerless to discipline their leaders. Meanwhile, by linking leadership survival to the decisions and policies of a self-serving foreign power, intervention provides flawed incentives to the state leaders, which increases their predatory behaviour. In such situations, state leaders, rather than strengthening formal state institutions, again intensify the collective action problem and increase social fragility as mechanisms for survival.     

Modeling Political Efficacy and Interest Group Membership

Traditionally, political efficacy is measured at the individual level and studied as an individual level attribute in isolation from macro level events. In many studies, political efficacy is viewed as largely static, affected primarily by levels of income and education. If, however, an individual's feeling of efficacy is partly conditioned on macro level occurrences or expected macro level occurrences, then individual efficacy cannot be studied in isolation from the macro level context. In this article, I create a game theoretic, micro level foundation for macro level interest group behavior. I use a simple participation game to model a form of individual level political efficacy and detail the empirical implications of the hypothesized individual level behavior for the aggregate levels of group membership. The results suggest that empirical studies of the effects of political efficacy on collective efforts are susceptible to sampling and measurement problems.     

All Mistakes Are Not Equal: Intelligence Errors and National Security

Strategic situations create motivational biases that help to predict the type of errors intelligence communities are more likely to commit (Type I errors predict behavior never observed, while Type II errors fail to predict behavior later observed). When the dangers of inaction are low and the cost of action high, the intelligence community is more likely to fail to predict threats (Type II error). If the dangers of inaction are high and the costs of military action low, it is more likely to predict mistakenly threats never observed (Type I error). Studies of US and Israeli decision-making and analyses of two new experimental studies support this theory. The key is to recognize the incentives for error and to develop systems that, at worst, lead to intelligence errors (mistakes consistent with a state's national security needs) and not intelligence failures (errors contrary to national security requirements).     

The ideal and reality of epistemic proceduralism

The complex debate about proceduralism in deliberative democratic theory is important for understanding alternative models for bridging theory and practice. In this article, I contrast Jürgen Habermas’ model of epistemic proceduralism with that of David Estlund. I begin by locating the differences between them in terms of contrasting interpretations of Rousseau’s idea of the general will. On this basis, I set out two competing models of democratic proceduralism – an instrumental conception and a constitutive conception – and show how Estlund’s critique of Habermas’ procedural theory of ‘deep deliberative democracy’ mistakenly presupposes that Habermas is committed to an instrumental conception. After clarifying the role of Habermas’ ideal speech situation, I explicate and defend a Habermasian model of reflexive epistemic proceduralism. I conclude by considering the implications of this model for understanding the relationship between normative theory and empirical research.     

In Search of Culture: Lessons From the Past to Find a Role for the Study of Administrative Culture

H. Eckstein could say a few years ago that “political culture theory may plausibly be considered one of two still viable general approaches to political theory and explanation proposed since the early fifties to replace the long-dominant formalism-legalism of the field — the other being political rational choice theory” (1988, 789). For the last two decades, the rational choice approach has been dominant and thriving in many fields of political science, whether in international relations, political sociology, public administration or public policy; it has greatly reinforced the theoretical and empirical basis of the explanation of human freedom of action. But it has recently shown some signs of intellectual fatigue. Critics now underscore that, assuming that individuals compare expected benefits and costs of actions prior to adopting strategies for action, is valid and useful only in relatively simple choice situations where information is easily available and interpretable (Elster 1989; Dunleawy 1991). Some neo-institutionalists have claimed that rationality comes not as means-end calculus prior to action but rather as an ex-post justification after choice (March, Olsen 1989; Hall 1986, 15–20). Others have come to say that the rational choice approach, which explains how people ought to act in order to achieve aims and not what these aims ought to be, totally misses the central question of why it is that people have “preferences” and pursue some aims rather than others (Wildavsky 1987; Cook, Levi 1990; Wildavsky 1994). It does not mean that the rational choice approach should be discarded: there should rather be a “contextualization” of rationality which explains both why the same man in different situations or contexts adopts different rationalities, and why in the same context two men can adopt different rationalities (Wildavsky 1994). But the rational choice approach is also showing its limits in the very field where it was born and has blossomed: economics. In a recent issue of a French national newspaper, two articles dealing with economics and development were pointing at the same problem: cultural explanations of economic behavior are needed. In the first article, the former General Secretary of the United Nations, now President of the UNESCO-UNO World Commission on Culture and Development, J. Perez de Cuellar, advocated a cultural approach of the economic development of the Third World countries in order to find, at last, an enduring and practical solution to their endemic problems (1994). In the second article, a journalist reflecting on why the same hard economic therapies have worked in Poland but not in Russia could only refer to the “specific economic culture of Russia” described by economists (Vernholes 1994). These clear limits imposed upon the rational choice approach have brought culturalist theory back into favor among social scientists. Does this mean that a well-built culturalist theory might be a new “explanatory panacea, a universal nostrum” (Thompson, Ellis, Wildavsky 1992, 516)? The aim of this article is to try to unravel the cultural approach and assess its potential in the specific field of public administration. To do this, we shall draw on two close but relatively separate disciplines — political science and organizational theory — which we believe (should) meet to give a richer account of administrative reality. Our purpose is to question the recent interest in and utilization of the cultural metaphor(s) by bureaucrats, politicians, “special advisers” and authors in the analysis and implementation of administrative reform. The reason for this inquiry is that, contrary to analysts of private sector organizations, specialists of public sector organizations have not yet seriously addressed a culturalist theory of public administration while acknowledging that there is or there are public administration culture(s). We therefore hope to evaluate the usefulness of a culturalist theory for public administration. In this rather complex theoretical field, we prefer to take the simple solution to try to explain first the classical culturalist theory, and second, the new culturalist theory. Third, we should see whether there is or should be anything specific about administrative culture and a culturalist theory of public administration.