Building People, Building Power: Grassroots Collective Action in the USA

• In Event: Democracy and Social Movements

Abstract

How do vehicles of collective action build and exercise political power, given the improbability of their work? The organizations, movements, networks, and associations that build and sustain collective action—which we will generally refer to as organizations, broadly defined—play a unique role in American democracy. These organizations simultaneously reach inward to develop the capacities ordinary people need to act as agents of change in society, and outward to pressure decision-makers to heed the concerns of these constituents. Whether these vehicles take the form of formal bureaucratic organizations or more dispersed movement networks, all of them operate as intermediary institutions between the mass public and governmental institutions. Yet, given the strong status quo bias in American politics, in most cases, collective action fails. Nonetheless, the centrality of these types of organizations to the democratic project calls for more research unpacking the core logic that makes it possible for them to translate the actions of their constituency into political influence.

Most existing research focuses more on what vehicles of collective action need, rather than how they turn what they have into what they need. One stream of research, for instance, has focused on the free-rider problem. Olson’s framing of the collective action problem focused considerable subsequent research on the question of how organizations generate collective action at scale: how can selective incentives (benefits available to only those who help earn them), notions of civic duty, culture, relational ties, mobilizing structures, and other factors ameliorate the temptation to free ride)? A later stream of research focusing on social movements has examined the conditions and resources that vehicles of collective action need to affect change. This work has outlined a broad set of material and human resources); contextual conditions, such as state capacity, opportunity structures, inequality, or levels of cognitive liberation within a constituency; and cultural factors needed to make collective action politically influential of these factors create important constraints and opportunities, but focus more on the resources needed than the strategic choices leaders can make to turn resources into power.

We use variation in subnational politics to examine six cases studies of state based collective action, and synthesize findings across these six cases. Our argument examines commonalities across these cases, working in different geographies, on different issues, with different constituencies. Our story, in the end, is one of people beholden to people—of leaders and constituents embedded in organizations—and the strategic constraints and possibilities those relationships create for exercising power in politics. As such, we deviate from trends in the study and practice of collective action in two key ways.

First, we focus on strategy in dynamic political environments. Coaches, generals, and CEOs recognize the importance of strategy in sports, war, and business for navigating competitive, dynamic terrain. Politics is similarly competitive and dynamic. The study and practice of collective action, however, often underestimates the range of strategic choices leaders can make. Whether the goal is symbolic, disruptive, or to achieve other kinds of power, many models assess the effectiveness of collective action by the scale of resources amassed. In contrast, our cases showed alternative strategic logics.

Second, we focus on the collective side of collective action. Copious research on and practical studies of collective action examine how to generate action at scale. But what makes collective action collective? We argue that collective action is more than the additive sum of individual actions. Instead, the leaders and organizations we studied were able to exert power in large part because they were grounded in constituencies who had committed to standing together, to becoming something new together that they could not be alone. In choosing to stand with each other, these constituencies became cognizant of not only their rights to express their interests in the political process, but also the responsibilities they needed to accept to make it possible. These constituencies were thus able to hold tensions that often seem to contradict each other—commitment and flexibility, ideology and pragmatism—making possible a different kind of politics.

Author

• Hahrie C. Han, Johns Hopkins University