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Budgetary agreements may be thought of as collective action problems in which the problem a hand is maintaining group cohesion by controlling free riders. The standard solution to the free rider problem includes monitoring group behavior and imposing sanctions. This article analyzes the collective action problem present in the budgetary provisions of the Maastricht Treaty, which created the Economic Monetary Union, by focusing on the four stages of budgetary compliance that are evident in all budgetary agreements and treaties.

ABSTRACTThe collective action problem around water use and management involves solving both the problems of provision and appropriation. Cooperation in the provision can be affected by the rival nature of appropriation and the asymmetries in access. We report the results of two field experiments conducted in Colombia and Kenya. Theirrigation gamewas used to explore the provision and appropriation decisions under asymmetric or sequential appropriation, complemented by avoluntary contribution mechanismexperiment which looks at provision decisions under symmetric appropriation. The overall results were consistent with the patterns of previous studies: the zero contribution hypotheses is rejected whereas the most effective institution to increase cooperation was face-to-face communication, although we find that communication works much more effectively in Colombia than in Kenya. We also find that the asymmetric appropriation did reduce cooperation, though the magnitude of the social loss and the effectiveness of alternative institutional options varied across sites.

How do insurgents engaged in high-risk collective action maintain solidarity when faced with increasing costs and dangers? Based on a combination of process tracing through qualitative evidence and an event-history analysis of a unique data set assembled from naval archives concerning a mass mutiny in the Royal Navy in 1797, this article explains why insurgent solidarity varied among the ships participating in the mutiny. Maintaining solidarity was the key problem that the organizers of the mutiny faced in confronting government repression and inducements for ships' companies to defect. Solidarity, proxied here as the duration of a ship's company's adherence to the mutiny, relied on techniques used by the mutiny leadership that increased dependence and imposed control over rank-and-file seamen. In particular, mutiny leaders monitored and sanctioned compliance and exploited informational asymmetries to persuade seamen to stand by the insurgency, even as prospects for its success faded.

The literature on environmental activism has failed to produce a model of individual decision making explicitly linked to the logic of collective action. To remedy this problem, this article adapts the collective interest model developed by Finkel, Muller, and Opp to explain protest behavior and argues environmental activism is a function of citizen beliefs about collective benefits, the ability to influence collective outcomes, and the selective costs/benefits of participation. The author tests the hypotheses of the collective interest model using data from a survey of 460 residents of a coastal watershed and national data on 1,606 respondents from the 1993 General Social Survey Environment Battery. The author's findings corroborate several central propositions of the collective interest model and provide a theoretical account of environmental activism that synthesizes many previous results.

Collective Action 2.0: The Impact of Social Media on Collective Action provides a balanced look into how ICTs leverage and interact with collective action through avoiding technological determinism, utopianism, and fundamentalism, which impacts the current discourse. Recent events in different authoritarian regimes, such as Iran and Egypt, have drawn global attention to a developing phenomenon in collective action: people tend to organize through different social media platforms for political protest and resistance. This phenomenon describes a change in social structure and behavior tied to Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Social media platforms have been used to leverage collective action, which, in some cases, has arguable led to political revolution. The phenomenon also indicates that the way information is organized affects the organization of social structures with which it interacts. The phenomenon also has another side, namely the use of social media for activist suppression, state surveillance, or for the mobilization of collective action towards undesirable ends. Analyzes social media and collective action in a deep and balanced mannerPresents an account avoiding technological determinism, utopianism, and fundamentalismConsiders the underlying theory behind quick-paced social mediaTakes an interdisciplinary approach that will resonate with all those interested in social media and collective action, regardless of field specialty