Processes of Collective Political Action

Abstract

This article presents a new model that explains how collective political action develops over time under different structural conditions and given institutional settings. Two kinds of actors are distinguished: (a) The representatives of the state are endowed with the power to provide a certain public good and to impose costs on citizens by means of repressive action. The state's representatives aim at gaining a certain amount of support from the citizens and regard collective political action as a disturbance of their activities. (b) Citizens use collective political action to pressure the state to provide a public good. Each citizen is faced with specific incentives for collective political action. Proceeding from certain distributions of the incentives in a collective, processes of collective political action are evoked by a critical event (e.g., a nuclear reactor incident). Computer simulations are used to explore the implications of the model for three generated data sets. In a normal and a rectangular distribution, initial collective political action decreases so that the public good is not provided. Only in a u-shaped distribution does a large extent of collective political action emerge so that a partial provision of the public good ensues.