Midterm Review Flashcards
Collective Action Problem
Why would people ever participate in groups that seek to attain public good when they can just as well enjoy the public good without ever participating in its attainment?
Public good: available to everyone (nobody excluded)
Joint supply: one person’s consumption of the good does not detract from someone else’s consumption of the good (public tv, public park, highways)
The solution to the problem: Selective incentives – an incentive that can be targeted to specific individuals so that they can be excluded from recieving it if they do or do not cooperate.
Selective incentives come from resources, and organization & leadership
What is an example of the collective action problem?
Individuals often want to do things that emit a lot of greenhouse gases (liking driving cars, or flying in planes), but society overall may be better off with less climate change.
Resource Mobilization – Assumptions?
Explaining collective action requires attention to the resources, selective incentives, cost-reducing mechanisms, and benefits that make participation in movements rational
Grievances are structurally given, and therefore relatively constant. They may be defined, created, and manipulated by movements themselves
Resource Mobilization – Arguments?
The aggregation and deployment of resources is critical for explaining movement success
Emphasize the need for some minimal organization for mobilization to be successful. Social movements are also broader than that.
Movement success depends on the involvement of individuals and organizations from outside the beneficiary group
Conscience constituents – refer to people as part of a social movement, but don’t stand to benefit themselves from what the social movement is trying to achieve. They have critical things they can contribute to the movement. Ex. Freedom Riders)
The importances of costs and rewards in explaining individual participation
Problems with the Resource Mobilization Approach?
Possible circularity if a resource is anything that aids mobilization (Resources are things that can be internalized by a movement – money, labor, facilities, skills, equipment)
The assumption that grievances are relatively constant is not realistic. There are times that grievances can multiply very quickly and suddenly, often in response to violence. They can also vary across time.
The limits of resources as a factor in mobilization – there are ages of little mobilization despite large amounts of resources; also cases of mobilization without any resources. Resources cannot explain all forms of action.
It raises questions about people’s tendency to advocate hierarchical, bureaucratic, professionalized social movements over looser, less hierarchical groups.
Political Opportunity Approach – Origins?
Put attention back on the state rather than focusing on the challenging movement or group
Little in resource mobilization theory was about the TARGETS of mobilization: when are the targets of mobilization more vulnerable to being influenced by collective action, and how did that affect the likelihood and outcome of mobilization?
Political Opportunity Approach?
A political opportunity is a condition that renders a target of mobilization more vulnerable and is therefore a propitious moment or venue for those excluded for mounting collective action – renders a target more vulnerable to influence or weakens its ability to repress.
Examples of Political Opportunities?
liberalization, moments of leadership secession, appearance of influential allies, visible conflict within the elite, elections, war, natural disaster
Problems with the Political Opportunity Approach?
Tendency for abuse
How do we identify the presence of a political opportunity?
Some types of protest do not seem to be affected by political opportunities – lifestyle movements
Critics argue that opportunities are neither necessary nor sufficient for mobilization: but the theory does not claim tis – opportunities only increase the likelihood of action in their presence because they make success easier, but they do not prohibit action in the absence of opportunity. Movements can win without opportunity.
THe difficulties of engaging the perceptual dimension of opportunists. What is a missed opportunity? Were misperceived opportunities really there? How do we know?
Can movements create their own theories? If so, does this invalidate the theory?
Types of Political Opportunities?
Perceived Opportunity -
Their presence increases the likelihood of success and therefore, when they are perceived, they increase the likelihood of action
Dynamic Opportunity -
The opening of a system increases opportunities, the closing decreases them.
Static Opportunity -
Aspects of institutional design that affect the likelihood of success by challengers
Crowd Theory?
Lebon!
The fact that people have been transformed into a crowd puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind which makes them feel, think, and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would think, feel, and act if in isolation.
What does Crowd Theory happen?
Anonymity breeds unaccountability
A sense of invincibility – crowds have power.
Hypnotic effect – makes people subject to suggestibility and to influences of leaders
Contagion in crowds and the unconscious mind – ‘herd mentality’
Problems with Crowd Theory?
Most people do not exchange in extraordinary behavior in the context of a crowd – milling is the main thing that most people in a crowd do
People are rarely anonymous in the context of a crowd – most people come to demonstrations with friends and family; plus face recognition is powerful in this day
No evidence of cognitive impairment of individuals in crowds – sometimes critical thinking is actually enhanced
Suggestibility can be found outside of crowds
Crowd theory ultimately takes the unusual behavior that occasionally occurs within crowds and generalizes it. Can happen when crowds are infused with enormous anger and/or fear but not normally the case.
Relative Deprivation
Gurr - the gap between the ‘ought’ and the ‘is’ of collective value satisfaction
How do people perceive injustice + relationship of injustice to mobilization
There is no direct casual relationship between absolute deprivation and rebellion - instead, mediated by a sense of what one thinks one deserves
Types of Relative Deprivation
Decremental - expectations remain constant, capabilities decline
Aspirational - rising expectations, constant capabilities
Progressive - growing gap occurs even though expectations and capabilities are both increasing
Why is Relative Deprivation no longer used?
Difficulty of measuring, since it is a perception
Difficult to know what the referent group is
Empirical work contradicted the theory
Is neither necessary nor sufficient for rebellion – minimizes the role of the state
No direct relationship between the presence of grievances and protest – most people do not act in the face of injustice – also many other reasons other than grievances
Critical Mass Theory
Group size has a positive effect on the probability that a public good will be provided; because joint supply, the benefit of the public good for each individual is not reduced as the size of the group (a matter of costs, not benefits).
Not necessary for everyone to participate.
So basically it is this critical number of people needed to affect policy and make a change not as the token but as an influential body.
Apply the Critical Mass Theory to 1979 Iran
Most Iranian protests in 1979 did not participate in large numbers until they felt success was at hand
There were no political opportunities
Iranians seem to have based their decision not on the vulnerability of the state, but on the perceived strength of the opposition.
A shift balance of forces in favor of the opposition emerged
New Social Movements Theory
These left cultural legacies for remobilization
Aimed at explaining the broader question of movement emergence
Theories focus on culture-change and identity as key explanatory variables, but linking these with broader processes of social change
Social change → cultural change → movement emergence
Not really used much today
Critiques of New Social Movements Theory
Seriously overstated the novelty of the movements that it analyzed (these movements were not entirely new)
The theory could not explain the fate of new social movements since the 1960s, or the unexpected appearance of ‘new’ social movements in the 3rd World.
Limits as a general theory of social movements
What are the 2 Approaches of the New Social Movements Theory?
Post-Marxist Approach
- New social movements were movements of resistance against bureaucratization and rationalization of social life
- Against manipulation, dependence, bureaucratization, and regulation
- For self-autonomy and identity
- Rejection of the state as source of social support [vs. labor and the welfare state]
Reconstitution of civil society - Focus on lifestyle issues – create an autonomous space
- The expression of personal identities is part of the purposes of the movement itself
Cultural (Values) Perspective
- Materialist v. Post-Materialist Values
- Presence of post-materialist values was the strongest indicator of whether an individual participated in environmental or peace movements
- Inglehart – the combination of these post-materialist values and cognitive mobilization (the skills and awareness needed for political participation) explained, to large extent, individual-level participation in new social movements.
Logic of Connective Action
The logic of connective action explains the rise of a personalized digitally networked politics in which diverse individuals address the common problems of our times such as economic fairness and climate change. Rich case studies from the US, UK, and Germany, illustrate a theoretical framework for understanding how large-scale connective action is coordinated using inclusive discourses that travel easily through social media.
In many of these mobilizations, communication operates as an organizational process that may replace or supplement familiar forms of collective action based on organizational resource mobilization, leadership, and collective action framing. In some cases, connective action emerges from crowds that shun leaders, as when Occupy protesters created media networks to channel resources and create loose ties among dispersed physical groups.
In other cases, conventional political organizations deploy personalized communication logics to enable large-scale engagement with a variety of political causes. The Logic of Connective Action shows how power is organized in communication-based networks, and what political outcomes may result.
Collective Behavior Approach – Definition
Definition: A response to larger structural strains in the social system (Durkheim – individuals feel alienated because of their lack of connection to others)
the behavior of individuals under the influence of an impulse that is common and collective, an impulse, in other words, that is the result of social interaction
Functionalist approach to social movements: a symptom of a social system in disequilibrium, whose equilibrating functions are not operating effectively
Social movements are not manifestations of the breakdown of norms in society; they are also mechanisms for the creation of new norms
Collective Behavior Approach – Problems
An excessively functionalist understanding of how social movements work
Stigmatizes movement activity as deviant and pathological
Overlooks the conflictual, interactive, moral basis of movement activity
Lumps disparate phenomena together
