Download or read book The Political Context of Collective Action written by Ricca Edmondson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-12-16 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of social and popular movements continues to attract great interest, but little is known of political activity which takes place outside of traditional political structures. Tnis volume looks at informal political action which arises when conventional frameworks, such as those provided by welfare states, are in crisis or decline. At such times the usual expectations about politcal action may not apply, so what actually goes on? Greatly expanding the scope for research into collective action, this volume will be of great interest to students and researchers of politics and sociology interested in this important area.
Download or read book Political Turbulence written by Helen Margetts and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How social media is giving rise to a chaotic new form of politics As people spend increasing proportions of their daily lives using social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, they are being invited to support myriad political causes by sharing, liking, endorsing, or downloading. Chain reactions caused by these tiny acts of participation form a growing part of collective action today, from neighborhood campaigns to global political movements. Political Turbulence reveals that, in fact, most attempts at collective action online do not succeed, but some give rise to huge mobilizations—even revolutions. Drawing on large-scale data generated from the Internet and real-world events, this book shows how mobilizations that succeed are unpredictable, unstable, and often unsustainable. To better understand this unruly new force in the political world, the authors use experiments that test how social media influence citizens deciding whether or not to participate. They show how different personality types react to social influences and identify which types of people are willing to participate at an early stage in a mobilization when there are few supporters or signals of viability. The authors argue that pluralism is the model of democracy that is emerging in the social media age—not the ordered, organized vision of early pluralists, but a chaotic, turbulent form of politics. This book demonstrates how data science and experimentation with social data can provide a methodological toolkit for understanding, shaping, and perhaps even predicting the outcomes of this democratic turbulence.
Download or read book The Political Economy of Collective Action Inequality and Development written by William D. Ferguson and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines how a society that is trapped in stagnation might initiate and sustain economic and political development. In this context, progress requires the reform of existing arrangements, along with the complementary evolution of informal institutions. It involves enhancing state capacity, balancing broad avenues for political input, and limiting concentrated private and public power. This juggling act can only be accomplished by resolving collective-action problems (CAPs), which arise when individuals pursue interests that generate undesirable outcomes for society at large. Merging and extending key perspectives on CAPs, inequality, and development, this book constructs a flexible framework to investigate these complex issues. By probing four basic hypotheses related to knowledge production, distribution, power, and innovation, William D. Ferguson offers an analytical foundation for comparing and evaluating approaches to development policy. Navigating the theoretical terrain that lies between simplistic hierarchies of causality and idiosyncratic case studies, this book promises an analytical lens for examining the interactions between inequality and development. Scholars and researchers across economic development and political economy will find it to be a highly useful guide.
Download or read book Social Movements and Networks written by Mario Diani and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social Movements and Networks examines the extent to which a network approach should inform research on collective action. For the first time in a single volume, leading social movements researchers systematically map out and assess the contribution of social network approaches to their field of enquiry in light of broader theoretical perspective. By exploring how networks affect individual contributions to collective action in both democratic and non-democratic organizations, and how patterns of inter-organizational linkages affect the circulation of resources within and between movements, the authors show how network concepts improve our grasp of the relationship between social movements and elites and of the dynamics of the political processes.
Download or read book Collective Action and the Civil Rights Movement written by Dennis Chong and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-12-10 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collective Action and the Civil Rights Movement is a theoretical study of the dynamics of public-spirited collective action as well as a substantial study of the American civil rights movement and the local and national politics that surrounded it. In this major historical application of rational choice theory to a social movement, Dennis Chong reexamines the problem of organizing collective action by focusing on the social, psychological, and moral incentives of political activism that are often neglected by rational choice theorists. Using game theoretic concepts as well as dynamic models, he explores how rational individuals decide to participate in social movements and how these individual decisions translate into collective outcomes. In addition to applying formal modeling to the puzzling and important social phenomenon of collective action, he offers persuasive insights into the political and psychological dynamics that provoke and sustain public activism. This remarkably accessible study demonstrates how the civil rights movement succeeded against difficult odds by mobilizing community resources, resisting powerful opposition, and winning concessions from the government.
Download or read book Studying Collective Action written by Mario Diani and published by SAGE Publications Limited. This book was released on 1992 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Research and theorizing in collective action and new social movements have grown rapidly since the 1970s. This volume provides some of the best recent work in the field and illustrates the efforts that have been made to develop research strategies which could fit the theoretical and empirical peculiarities of the research object. Examples include both quantitative approaches such as protest event analysis and network analysis; and qualitative approaches like political discourse analysis and life-histories. It also addresses problems of data construction, research design and operationalization.
Download or read book Collective Action and Political Transformations written by Aurea Mota and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-03 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book acknowledges the severe problems with effective and significant collective action, but arrives at a more optimistic diagnosis of our time by rethinking the political from the angle of the experiences with progressive and conservative collective action in different parts of the globe: Brazil, South Africa and Europe. By doing so, it contributes a critical perspective to the debate about the possible impact of parts of the Global South for positive social and political developments worldwide.
Download or read book Collective Action written by Russell Hardin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-12-03 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Public choice, an important subdiscipline in the field of political theory, seeks to understand how people and societies make decisions affecting their collective lives. Relying heavily on theoretical models of decision making, public choice postulates that people act in their individual interests in making collective decisions. As it happens, however, reality does not mirror theory, and people often act contrary to what the principal public choice models suggest. In this book, Russell Hardin looks beyond the models to find out why people choose to act together in situations that the models find quite hopeless. He uses three constructs of modern political economy--public goods, the Prisoner's Dilemma, and game theory--to test public choice theories against real world examples of collective action. These include movements important in American society in the past few decades--civil rights, the Vietnam War, women's rights, and environmental concerns. This classic work on public choice will be of interest to theoreticians and graduate students in the fields of public choice, political economy, or political theory--and to those in other disciplines who are concerned with the problem of collective action in social contexts.
Download or read book Modern Dilemmas written by Dylan Kissane and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-01 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collective action problems are ubiquitous in situations involving human interactions and therefore lie at the heart of economy and political science. In one of the most salient statements on this topic, Elinor Ostrom, co-recipient of the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, even claims that "the theory of collective action is the central subject of political science". The collection of essays presented in this timely volume targets the problem of collective action from both a theoretical and applied perspective. Its multidisciplinary approach makes it a valuable reading for students and scholars working in a number of different areas of study, such as political science, economy, political philosophy, public policies, comparative politics, and international relations.
Download or read book Collective Action in Organizations written by Bruce Bimber and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-02-29 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores how people participate in public life through organizations. The authors examine three organizations and show surprising similarities across them.
Download or read book Narrative Politics written by Frederick W. Mayer and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Narrative Politics explores two puzzles. The first has long preoccupied social scientists: How do individuals come together to act collectively in their common interest? The second is one that has long been ignored by social scientists: Why is it that those who promote collective action so often turn to stories? Why is it that when activists call for action, candidates solicit votes, organizers seek new members, generals rally their troops, or coaches motivate their players, there is so much story-telling? Frederick W. Mayer argues that answering these questions requires recognizing the power of story to overcome the main obstacles to collective action: to surmount the temptation to free ride, to coordinate group behavior, and to arrive at a common understanding of the collective interest. In this book, Mayer shows that humans are, if nothing else, a story-telling, story-consuming animal. We use stories to make sense of our experience and to imbue it with meaning-our self-narratives define our sense of identity and script our actions. Because we are constituted by narrative, we can be moved by the stories told to us by others. That is why leaders who call a community to action seek to frame their invocations in a story in which tragedy and triumph hang in the balance, in which taking part in the collective action becomes a moral imperative rather than a matter of calculated self-interest. Drawing on insights from neuroscience and behavioral economics, political science and sociology, history and cultural studies, literature and narrative theory, Narrative Politics sheds light on a wide range of political phenomena from social movements to electoral politics to offer lessons for how the power of story fosters collective action.
Download or read book Advocacy Organizations and Collective Action written by Aseem Prakash and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-11-25 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Advocacy organizations are viewed as actors motivated primarily by principled beliefs. This volume outlines a new agenda for the study of advocacy organizations, proposing a model of NGOs as collective actors that seek to fulfil normative concerns and instrumental incentives, face collective action problems, and compete as well as collaborate with other advocacy actors. The analogy of the firm is a useful way of studying advocacy actors because individuals, via advocacy NGOs, make choices which are analytically similar to those that shareholders make in the context of firms. The authors view advocacy NGOs as special types of firms that make strategic choices in policy markets which, along with creating public goods, support organizational survival, visibility, and growth. Advocacy NGOs' strategy can therefore be understood as a response to opportunities to supply distinct advocacy products to well-defined constituencies, as well as a response to normative or principled concerns.
Download or read book Collective Action Theory and Empirical Evidence written by Ronald A. Francisco and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2010-03-10 with total page 123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book comprises empirical tests of the theoretical implications of collective action theory specifically with regard to mobilization. It is based on the author’s European Protest and Coercion Data, which won the Comparative Politics Section of American Political Science Association award for the best data set in 2007. The data is supplemented by historical investigations as well as other research. The volume is divided into six chapters. The introduction covers the theory of collective action in its many manifestations as well as the process of drawing out theoretical implications. The second chapter goes to the core of the mobilization issues, especially with regard to the role of leadership, which is inextricably linked to mobilization. The third chapter applies the concept of adaptation to the development of more productive tactics that promote mobilization in support of a public good and minimize the possibility of repression. In chapter four, five spatial hypotheses based on rationality and formal theories are developed and the role of time in protests is addressed. The fifth chapter focuses on the fundamental problems of terror with evidence from the Basque region of Spain and France from Ireland against the Provisional Irish Republican Army. The final chapter surveys the empirical evidence and summarizes the support of collective action theory. Testing collective action theory implications with empirical evidence will appeal to political scientists, sociologists, economists and researchers concerned with mobilization.
Download or read book Contention in Context written by James Jasper and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2011-11-16 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite extensive theoretical debates over the utility of "political opportunities" as an explanation for the rise and success of social movements, there have been surprisingly few serious empirical tests. Contention in Context provides the most extensive effort to date to test the model, analyzing a range of important cases of revolutions and protest movements to identify the role of political opportunities in the rise of political contention. With evidence from more than fifty cases, this book explores the role of the state in protest, the frequent overemphasis on political opportunities in recent research, and the extent to which opportunity models ignore the cultural and emotional triggers for collective action. By examining new directions in the study of protest and contention, this book shows that although political opportunities can help explain the emergence of certain kinds of movements, a new strategic language can ultimately tell us far more.
Download or read book Challenging Codes written by Alberto Melucci and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996-09-12 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Challenging Codes Melucci brings an original perspective to research on collective action which both emphasizes the role of culture and makes telling connections with the experience of the individual in postmodern society. The focus is on the role of information in an age which knows both fragmentation and globalisation, building on the analysis of collective action familiar from the author's Nomads of the Present. Melucci addresses a wide range of contemporary issues, including political conflict and change, feminism, ecology, identity politics, power and inequality.
Download or read book Contention in Context written by James M. Jasper and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2011-11-16 with total page 586 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite extensive theoretical debates over the utility of "political opportunities" as an explanation for the rise and success of social movements, there have been surprisingly few serious empirical tests. Contention in Context provides the most extensive effort to date to test the model, analyzing a range of important cases of revolutions and protest movements to identify the role of political opportunities in the rise of political contention. With evidence from more than fifty cases, this book explores the role of the state in protest, the frequent overemphasis on political opportunities in recent research, and the extent to which opportunity models ignore the cultural and emotional triggers for collective action. By examining new directions in the study of protest and contention, this book shows that although political opportunities can help explain the emergence of certain kinds of movements, a new strategic language can ultimately tell us far more.
Download or read book Governing the Commons written by Elinor Ostrom and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-23 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tackles one of the most enduring and contentious issues of positive political economy: common pool resource management.
