Collective Action

The facts that there is a lot of collective action even in many large-number contexts... and that, therefore, many people are not free riding in relevant contexts suggest [that]...

Despite the fact that people regularly grasp the incentive to free ride on the efforts of others in many contexts, it is also true that the logic of collective action is hard to grasp in the abstract. The cursory history... [of collective action] suggests just how hard it was to come to a general understanding of the problem. Today, there are thousands of social scientists and philosophers who do understand it and maybe far more who still do not. But in the general population, few people grasp it. Those who teach these issues regularly discover that some students insist that the logic is wrong, that it is, for example, in the interest of workers to pay dues voluntarily to unions or that it is in one’s interest to vote.... It would be extremely difficult to assess how large is the role of misunderstanding in the reasons for action in general because those who do not understand the issues cannot usefully be asked whether they do understand. But the evidence of misunderstanding and ignorance is extensive.

Russell Hardin, 2003¹

The failure of collective action in large-scale interdependent efforts, this chapter shows, is the consequence of causal negligibility rather than the intention to free ride on others’ efforts. Rational choice theory puts forward a different explanation: that collective enterprises are doomed to failure because of the overriding logic of the Prisoner’s Dilemma game, extended from two individuals to countless individuals. This deep-seated worry over individually enacted globally destructive action, which resonates with con­temporary concerns over climate change, overfished seas, and boycotts, has

¹ Russell Hardin, “The Free Rider Problem,” Stanford Encyclopedia ofPhilosophy, 2003,accessed January 30, 2015, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/free-rider/.

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been labeled “the tragedy of the commons,” and the free rider problem.^[523] Just as in a two-person PD game, individual self-interest recommends defecting and thus leads to mutual impoverishment, so, too, in a situation with multiple persons, such logic will necessarily lead to the failure of collective action, whether in the case of an environmental commons or the provision of public goods such as infrastructure.

This chapter examines within historical context the neoliberal common lore that it is rational to free ride on collective enterprises and that large-scale ventures must fail accordingly, and it shows how such common lore contradicts both conventional wisdom and recent theoretical investigations of the topic. First, the chapter briefly discusses the application of game theory to climate change and highlights how the Prisoner’s Dilemma and strategic rationality continue to dominate social scientific approaches to developing public policies to solve social dilemmas. Second, it introduces the logic behind the Prisoner’s Dilemma assessment of collective action via the extension of the two-person game to multiple individuals. Third, it discusses Mancur Olson’s 1965 Logic of Collective Action to show that even quite recently, prominent theorists con­cluded that individuals could cooperate without the introduction of sanctioning devices in small and mid-sized groups.

The chapter’s conclusion dovetails with Elinor Ostrom’s 1990 work Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Whereas Ostrom provides empirical evidence to demonstrate that actors are capable of achieving mutually beneficial outcomes in variously sized ventures, this chapter discredits the theoretical structure underpinning the thesis that working together in small, medium, and large groups epito­mizes Prisoner’s Dilemma logic. It demonstrates that the challenge confront­ing multi-actor undertakings is the failure of purposive agency due to everyone’s inability to make an appreciable difference, rather than anyone’s inclination to exploit others’ efforts. It will again show how strategic ration­ality is insufficient to serve as humankind’s sole meaningful rationale for action. The chapter concludes by contrasting the classical liberal view of perfect competition as a public good and guarantor of mutual prosperity with the neoliberal inability to exit the Prisoner’s Dilemma in interactions of any size and attendant reliance on enforcement mechanisms to offset mutual ruin.