6.1: What is Collective Action? What are Social Movements?

Introduction

Public education, elections, and lobbying--all of these are connected to collective action. Collective action pervades social and political life, and it is observable across all societies. Collective action is any activity in which coordination by and across individuals has the potential to lead to achievement of a common objective. At its broadest, collective action can lead to the provision of a public good. A society often decides that the common defense is a necessary public good and pools resources toward that goal. Beyond common defense, collective action is key for the provision of a variety of public goods--such as public education, healthcare, childcare, pensions, and infrastructure--in which individuals contribute tax revenues or labor, in a coordinated way, to support common goals. Yet collective action can also lead to the achievement of narrower objectives, such as when a focused interest group lobbies for tax breaks that benefit a smaller segment of society. Collective action can result in benefits for all or for the few. That it encompasses such a broad range of actors, actions, goals, and outcomes explains the enduring interest that political scientists have in this concept.

Societies flourish when there is the robust provision of public goods; public goods are the result of collective action. Once provided, a public good has certain characteristics. As defined in Chapter 8, public goods are defined as goods and services provided by the state that are available for everyone in society. They are non-excludable and non-rival in nature. Individuals cannot be excluded from enjoying them, and one person's enjoyment of that good does not impinge upon others' enjoyment of that good. These characteristics of a public good have the unfortunate effect of impeding the organizing of collective action to provide that good, a problem we will take up later in this chapter. So-called collective action problems are observable throughout societies, but societies also manage to solve them in various ways.

Collective action may also lead to narrower objectives than public goods, such as the provision of common pool resources. These resources are non-excludable but rivalrous in consumption. A good example of a common pool resource is a river: Everyone can enjoy the river, but when a farmer diverts water from the river to irrigate their fields, that means others cannot enjoy the diverted water. Collective action also pervades the private sector, and we see this when industry advocacy groups procure favorable government policies such as tax breaks for all the firms in an industry or looser regulatory oversight.

Collective action is fundamental to the functioning of modern societies. A prominent example in our society is elections. Voting is a form of collective action, especially in a democracy where individuals' decisions to vote and cast ballots for a certain candidate or policy can determine a society's values and allocation of resources. When the electorate in a country is very large, as in the United States, collective action problems become evident. Each individual in a large electorate has disincentives to vote because they may believe their vote--out of hundreds of millions of eligible voters--will not matter. Hence, they may opt to stay home on election day (or not mail in their ballot) and save their time and energy for other purposes. Such individual-level breakdowns in collective action have the potential to lead to the collapse of any given collective action endeavor (in this case, the representativeness of a republic).

Yet history abounds with examples of collective action prevailing. It has led to social change and even revolution. While the example of voting demonstrates how collective action can work in tandem with established political institutions, collective action can also occur outside of existing political institutions. Because of this, collective action has the potential to destabilize societies and challenge existing structures. One illustration of this is when groups unite to demand the franchise (the right to vote) or when workers' strikes bring industry to a standstill.

Social movements are a subset of collective action. All social movements rely on collective action, but not all collective action is a social movement. Social movements are coordinated and goal-oriented, but they are characterized by political activity outside of established institutions (extra-institutional). Notable examples of social movements in the 20th century United States include the Civil Rights Movement, which sought equal rights for racial minorities and an end to institutional racism at all levels of government, and various labor rights movements, such as those organized by farm-workers and industrial workers earlier in the century. These examples translate easily to a comparative context, as social movements for civil rights and labor rights have spanned the globe. The comparative cases in the final section of this chapter will explore comparative labor movements in the socialist and post-socialist world.