POL SCI 40 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Collective Action, Connecticut Compromise, The Foundations
Document Summary
People don"t rat out the mob because they will kill you if you do so. They coordinate behavior by threatening force and demonstrating it with others. Collective action offers participants benefits they cannot achieve individually. Hard to coordinate: people free-ride, abuse public goods, defect. Other things you should know from the readings. Transaction costs: the costs of doing political business reflected in the time and effort required to compare preferences and negotiate compromises in making collective decisions. Conformity costs: the difference between what a person ideally would prefer and what the group with which that person makes collective decision actually does. Individuals pay conformity costs whenever collective decisions produce policy outcomes that do not best serve their interests. Agency loss: the discrepancy between what citizens ideally would like their agents to do and how the agents actually behave. Externalities: public goods or bads generated as a by-product of private activity.
