Policy Networks as Collective Action

Policy Networks and Institutional Collective Action: A Research Agenda

Networks and collective action

This paper proposes a new measure for a group’s ability to lead society to adopt their standard of behavior, which in particular takes account of the time the group takes to convince the whole society to adopt their position. This notion of a group’s power to initiate action is computed as the reciprocal of the resistance against it, which is in turn given by the expected absorption time of a r...

Environmental Activism as Collective Action

The literature on environmental activism has failed to produce a model of individual decision making explicitly linked to the logic of collective action. To remedy this problem, this article adapts the collective interest model developed by Finkel, Muller, and Opp to explain protest behavior and argues environmental activism is a function of citizen beliefs about collective benefits, the abilit...

Collective Action as Individual Choice

Collective action raises both conceptual and descriptive questions. The conceptual question concerns when we should count a set of actions performed by individuals as a unified ‘collective action’. For example, when a group of passengers aboard a broken bus spontaneously exit the bus and push it off the railroad tracks, we would call this event an instance of ‘collective action’ – we would say ...

Collective Action Games Embedded in Social Networks

The paper presents a model that synthetically incorporates several paradigms of collective action theories to bring up conditions when different types of collective action games would occur. Different from past literatures, the paper focuses on the analysis when various types of actors are allowed to play games interactively. The designation of game-playing partners follows the three mechanisms...