The low-cost hypothesis predicts that the strength of effects of environmental concern on environmental behavior diminishes with increasing behavioral costs. Thus, environmental concern influences ...

Green and Greenback: The Behavioral Effects of Environmental Attitudes in Low-Cost and High-Cost Situations

Positive and negative selective incentives are shown analytically to have different structural implications when used to induce collective action. Positive selective incentives are effective for motivating small numbers of cooperators and generate pressures toward smaller, more "elite" actions, unless the incentives have jointness of supply. Nega­ tive selective incentives are effective for motivating unanimous co­ operation, but their use is often uneven and cyclical and may gener­ ate hostilities which disrupt the cooperation they enforce. Examples of these dynamics are found in many arenas of collective action and social movements. One important feature of collective action is the use of selective incen­ tives to reward those who cooperate in the action or punish those who do not. An arts fund may reward contributors by giving a lavish party or by printing their names in a program. Workers ensure cooperation with a strike by threatening to ostracize or beat up strikebreakers. In the 1960s, famous folksingers rewarded antiwar demonstrators by singing at protest rallies. In the 1970s, Louisville antibusing protesters threatened violence against other whites to induce them to keep their children out of school. This paper considers relations among potential cooperators, not their re­ lations with any "enemy." It discusses the processes that arise when actors reward and punish each other to motivate or sustain cooperation in some form of collective action. The first half of the paper provides a formal analysis which reviews the work of Mancur Olson and his critics, formal­ izes the decision to participate in collective action, and then formalizes and examines the decision to use a resource as a selective incentive to in­ duce others to act collectively. The second half of the paper draws out the implications of this analysis. The most important implication is the difference between rewards and punishments when they are used as selective incentives. This implication 1 I would like to thank James Wiggins, Elizabeth Martin, Patricia Rieker, Jean War­ ren, Ross Purdy, William Gamson, and Anthony Oberschall for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper, and especially to acknowledge the extensive, detailed, and illuminating critical commentary of John Lemke, Bertrand Shelton, and three anony­ mous reviewers as this paper moved toward its final form.

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Rewards and Punishments as Selective Incentives for Collective Action: Theoretical Investigations

A causal model of relationships between structural properties of states, civic culture attitudes of the general public, and change in level of democracy is tested with cross-national data. The model permits inferences about the possibility of unidirectional or reciprocal causation between civic culture attitudes and democracy, controlling for macrosocietal variables such as economic development, income inequality, and subcultural pluralism. Most civic culture attitudes do not have any significant impact on change in democracy. One of them, interpersonal trust, appears clearly to be an effect rather than a cause of democracy. The exception is the percentage of the general public that prefers gradual reform of society instead of revolutionary change or intransigent defense of the status quo. Support for gradual reform has a positive impact on change in democracy, and it is unrelated to a country's years of continuous democracy—findings that support the hypothesis of a unidirectional civic culture effect on democracy.

Civic Culture and Democracy: The Question of Causal Relationships.

This article pushes forward our understanding of populism by developing one of the more underappreciated definitions of populism, populism as discourse It does so by creating a quantitative measur

Is Chávez Populist?: Measuring Populist Discourse in Comparative Perspective

Rational choice theories have difficulty accounting for individual participation in collective action. Voting is among the acts hardest to explain; consumption benefits have been proposed to account for nonzero turnout. The model presented here establishes a political investment basis for these benefits. I argue that voters often act not in isolation but as part of groups with shared interests. While individuals still vote because of consumption benefits arising from the act of voting, some of these consumption benefits are provided by group leaders out of collective benefits received by the group in return for its votes. The collective benefit comes from a candidate adopting policy positions closer to those of the group. In passing, I show that the widespread availability of public opinion polling increases the candidate's incentive to shift position. Finally, some data from recent off-year elections are shown to be consistent with the model.

Christopher K. Vanderpool

Papers

Sociologists, Economists and Democracy.

Comparative Studies in Science and Society

Comparative studies in science and society