The Collective Action Problems of Political Consolidation: Evidence from Poland

Abstract

The problem of collective action, while noticed early by Rousseau and Hume, received its first model in the 1950’s in the celebrated Prisoner’s Dilemma introduced by Flood and Drescher and motivated by Albert Tucker’s familiar story. Later, with the development of game theory, problems of collective action were thoroughly formalized as variants of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, coordination games, or just strategic games with a unique Nash equilibrium that is strictly Pareto dominated (Hardin 1982; Sandler 1992). Among the early social scientists who analyzed social dilemmas with simple models was Thomas Schelling. Mancur Olson, Schelling’s student, focused in his dissertation on the intersection of economics and politics. He made studying the problems of collective action his lifetime research program. He applied his framework and its variants to the workings of professional associations and labor unions (1965), maintaining the NATO (1966, with R. Zeckhauser), interest group formation and their impact on the aggregated welfare (1982), revolution-making (1990), or incentives facing various rulers to cultivate economic growth (2000). He demonstrated that political and economic collective action problems are not mere curiosities, paradoxes, or aberrations of otherwise efficient markets. They underlie every aspect of human activity and have profound political and economic consequences.