Collective Action and the Civil Rights Movement.

TLDR

The paper examines the dynamics of public‑spirited collective action within the context of the American civil rights movement and its surrounding politics. It seeks to reexamine collective action organization by incorporating social, psychological, and moral incentives often overlooked by rational choice theorists. The authors employ game‑theoretic concepts and dynamic models to analyze how rational individuals decide to participate and how those decisions aggregate into collective outcomes. The formal model yields persuasive insights into the political and psychological dynamics that sustain activism and demonstrates that the civil rights movement succeeded by mobilizing community resources, resisting opposition, and securing governmental concessions.

Abstract

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.