US FORIEGN POLICY WEEK 1

Competing across an ideological divide symbolized by the “Iron Curtain,” they sought allies, trading partners, mili- tary bases, strategic minerals, and investment opportuni- ties in Asian, African, Middle Eastern, and Latin American countries. Diplomatic maneuvering, economic pressure, selective aid, intimidation, propaganda, assassi- nations, low-intensity military operations, and full-scale proxy wars were used as instruments of influence and con- trol from about 1947 until the decline of the Warsaw Pact (the Communist bloc of nations, led by the Soviet Union) in the late 1980s.

There are also variations in the intensity of the cold war relations that can be tied to changes in U.S. and Soviet political leadership. A slight weakening of hostili- ties following Stalin’s death in 1953 was followed by esca- lating tensions following the Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957, the erection of the Berlin Wall and the failed U.S. Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961, and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Tension eased a bit with signing of the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty in 1963, but Leonid Brezhnev’s consolidation of power in the Soviet Union contributed to growing hostilities, which waned again in the 1970s during the era of détente and the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I) Agreement.

The cold war also witnessed the largest arms race in history, leading to widespread global fears of a potential nuclear war (see Clausen 1993). The nuclear arms race, which began after the Korean War, was influenced by the actions and perceptions of both U.S. president John F. Kennedy and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev. Although the arms race made the policy of deterrence credible, it was very costly for both sides. In fact, the the- ory of mutual assured destruction (MAD) led to the mil- itarization of both the United States and Soviet Union. Mikhail Gorbachev’s ascension to power in the 1980s, however, paved the way for future reductions in nuclear weapons and improved U.S.-Soviet relations.

S E E A L S O Arms Control and Arms Race; Bay of Pigs; Berlin Wall; Communism; Cuban Missile Crisis; Deterrence; Deterrence, Mutual; Gorbachev, Mikhail; Iron Curtain; Proliferation, Nuclear; Reagan, Ronald; Stalin, Joseph; Warsaw Pact; World War II

B I B L I O G R A P H Y

Clausen, Peter A. 1993. Nonproliferation and the National Interest: America’s Response to the Spread of Nuclear Weapons. New York: HarperCollins.

Kegley, Charles, Jr., and Eugene R. Wittkopf. 1996. American Foreign Policy: Pattern and Process, 5th ed. New York: St. Martin’s.

Parenti, Michael. 1989. The Sword and the Dollar: Imperialism, Revolution, and the Arms Race. New York: St. Martin’s.

Patterson, Thomas G. 1992. On Every Front: The Making and Unmaking of the Cold War, rev. ed. New York: W.W. Norton.

Rourke, John T. 1993. Evolution of the World Political System. In International Politics on the World Stage, 4th ed., ed. John T. Rourke, 32–55. Guilford, CT: Dushkin Publishing Group, 1993.

Rubinstein, Alvin Z. 1992. Soviet Foreign Policy since World War II: Imperial and Global, 4th ed. New York: HarperCollins.

Schlesinger, Arthur. 1971. Origins of the Cold War. In The Conduct of Soviet Foreign Policy, ed. Erik P. Hoffman and Frederick J. Fleron Jr., 228–254. Chicago: Aldine.

Kathie Stromile Golden

COLEMAN, JAMES S E E Education, Unequal.

COLLECTIVE ACTION The logic of collective action (Olson 1965), which has proved to be applicable to a broad range of social and eco- nomic situations, assumes that cooperation must be explained by the individual’s cost-benefit calculus rather than that of the group because the group as a whole is not rational but can only consist of rational individuals. Groups often seek public goods that are available, once they have been generated, to everyone, including those who did not contribute to producing them. Because indi- viduals potentially can receive the benefits of public goods without having contributed to their production, they have an incentive to let others pay for them.

In classic examples of collective action problems, such as preserving the environment, sharing a natural resource, participating in national defense, voting in mass elections, and engaging in social protests, group members gain when all individuals do their share, but for any individual the marginal benefit of contributing exceeds the cost. If each individual follows his or her self-interest, the outcome— total defection—is worse for everyone than if all had cooperated in supplying the public good. Studies of col- lective action using game theory, laboratory experiments, and historical cases have been used to identify the condi- tions under which rational actors are likely to cooperate when they have a strong incentive to be free riders.

Many groups alter cost-benefit calculations by offer- ing selective incentives in the form of material rewards to cooperators and punishments to free riders. Shame, praise, honor, and ostracism can be viewed in this regard as nonmaterial social selective incentives. The administra-

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Collective Action

tion of a system of selective incentives by a central author- ity or by group members, however, usually entails a sepa- rate collective action problem that requires further explanation because individuals have an incentive not to contribute to the maintenance of such a system.

Another potential selective incentive is the psycholog- ical or expressive benefit inherent in the activity. In this case the motivation for cooperation is not the outcome sought through collective action but the process or expe- rience of participation. For some people, political and organizational activity builds self-esteem and feelings of political efficacy, symbolizes political citizenship, rein- forces moral convictions, and constitutes an enthralling experience.

Aside from changing individual incentives, coopera- tion in groups can be fostered by repeated social interac- tions that introduce long-term calculations. In iterated social interaction, a person can try to influence the behav- ior of others by making his or her choices contingent on their earlier choices. Cooperation is therefore possible among self-interested individuals if they care sufficiently about future payoffs to modify their current behavior.

Conditional cooperation is less likely to solve the col- lective action problem as group size increases because defection is harder to identify and deter when many peo- ple are involved. Intuitively the members of small groups are likely to have closer personal bonds, individual contri- butions will have a greater impact on the likelihood of col- lective success, and individual defections can be observed more readily. For this reason contingent cooperation in large-scale ventures is facilitated when collective action entails a federated network of community groups and organizations.

There is no reason to suppose that successful collec- tive action can be driven by a single motivation, either coercive or voluntary. Self-interested calculations that are based on selective material incentives and ongoing social exchange often have to be supplemented by moral and psychological considerations and coordinated by political leadership to motivate people to contribute to collective goods. Also it is not necessary to assume that all contrib- utors to collective action will employ the same cost-bene- fit calculus. Collective action frequently relies on the initiative and sacrifice of committed leaders who supply information, resources, and monitoring and lay the foun- dation for subsequent conditional cooperation among more narrowly self-interested actors.

S E E A L S O Cooperation; Cost-Benefit Analysis; Free Rider; Groups; Interest Groups and Interests; Mobilization; Public Goods; Rational Choice Theory; Tragedy of the Commons; Transaction Cost

B I B L I O G R A P H Y

Chong, Dennis. 1991. Collective Action and the Civil Rights Movement. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hardin, Russell. 1982. Collective Action. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Olson, Mancur. 1965. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Taylor, Michael. 1987. The Possibility of Cooperation. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Dennis Chong

COLLECTIVE ACTION GAMES A collective action problem arises when two or more indi- viduals have the potential to jointly coordinate on some mutually beneficial action, but do not face the right incentives to act in this manner. Such situations are ubiq- uitous in economic and social life, and arise in the context of political mobilization, electoral turnout, pollution abatement, common property resource use, and the pri- vate provision of public goods such as irrigation systems, parks, and national defense.

Collective action problems are often modeled using the theory of games. A simple example is the public goods game, which has the following structure. Consider a group of n individuals, each of whom can either “contribute” or “not contribute” to the provision of a “public good.” The private cost of contributing is c. Each individual’s contri- bution results in a benefit b to each member of the group, including those who do not contribute. The aggregate benefits resulting from a contribution are therefore equal to nb. If b < c < nb, then the benefit to the group of a con- tribution exceeds the cost, but the benefits that accrue to the contributor are less than the cost. In this case, individ- uals who are unconcerned with the effects of their actions on others will fail to contribute, and if the entire group is composed of such individuals, no contributions will be observed. This is a worse outcome from the perspective of each individual than would arise if all were forced to con- tribute. Each member of the group can therefore benefit if, instead of being allowed to freely make their own choices, they were all subject to “mutual coercion, mutu- ally agreed upon” (Hardin 1968, p. 1247).

When some individuals behave in a manner that is beneficial to the group while others choose in accordance with their private interests alone, the latter are sometimes referred to as free riders. There are several ways in which collective action problems may be mitigated through the

Collective Action Games

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punishment of free-riding behavior. If the group is suffi- ciently small and stable, and interactions among its mem- bers are repeated over a long horizon, actions that benefit the group can be sustained by the fear that an individual deviation will trigger deviations by others, resulting in the complete collapse of prosocial behavior. Alternatively, even if interactions are not repeated, collective action can be sustained if individuals have the ability and the inclina- tion to impose direct punishments on each other for free riding. Experimental evidence suggests that many individ- uals do indeed have such preferences for “altruistic pun- ishment,” and that such propensities have played a key role historically in the sustainable management of com- mon property resources.

The most common solution to collective action prob- lems is through the intervention of a centralized authority that can set rules for behavior and impose sanctions on those who fail to comply. Sometimes these sanctions take the form of monetary fines, as in the case of tax evasion or the failure to meet pollution standards. In many instances, however, punishments can take the form of ostracism or expulsion, as in the case of clubs, trade unions, or politi- cal parties.

S E E A L S O Common Knowledge Rationality Games; Evolutionary Games; Game Theory; Noncooperative Games; Screening and Signaling Theory Games; Strategic Games

B I B L I O G R A P H Y

Bergstrom, Ted C., Larry Blume, and Hal Varian. 1986. On the Private Provision of Public Goods. Journal of Public Economics 29: 25–49.

Fehr, Ernst, and Simon Gächter. 2000. Cooperation and Punishment in Public Goods Experiments. American Economic Review 90: 980–994.

Hardin, Garret. 1968. The Tragedy of the Commons. Science 162: 1243–1248.

Marwell, Gerald, and Ruth E. Ames. 1981. Economists Free Ride, Does Anyone Else? Journal of Public Economics 15: 295–310.

Olson, Mancur. 1965. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Ostrom, Elinor. 1990. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

Sethi, Rajiv, and E. Somanathan. 1996. The Evolution of Social Norms in Common Property Resource Use. American Economic Review 86: 766–788.

Rajiv Sethi

COLLECTIVE MEMORY Contemporary usage of the term collective memory is largely traceable to Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), who wrote extensively in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912) about commemorative rituals, and to his stu- dent, Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945), who published a landmark study on The Social Frameworks of Memory in 1925. For Halbwachs, who accepted Durkheim’s sociolog- ical critique of philosophy, studying memory is not a mat- ter of reflecting on the properties of the subjective mind; rather, memory is a matter of how minds work together in society, how their operations are structured by social arrangements: “It is in society that people normally acquire their memories. It is also in society that they recall, recognize, and localize their memories” (Halbwachs 1992, p. 38). Halbwachs thus argued that it is impossible for individuals to remember in any coherent and persistent fashion outside of their group contexts. Group member- ships provide the materials for memory and prod the indi- vidual into recalling particular events and into forgetting others. Groups can even produce memories in individuals of events that they never experienced in any direct sense. Halbwachs thus resisted the more extreme intuitionist subjectivism of philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941) (whose work had nevertheless led Halbwachs to his inter- est in memory), as well as the commonsense view of remembering as a purely—perhaps even quintessen- tially—individual affair.

In contrast to Halbwachs’s discussion in The Social Frameworks of Memory, however—in which he argues that what individuals remember is determined by their group memberships but still takes place in their own minds—in The Legendary Topography of the Holy Land (1941) and elsewhere Halbwachs focused on publicly available com- memorative symbols, rituals, and representations. This more Durkheimian discussion in turn undergirded Halbwachs’s contrast between “history” and “collective memory” not as one between public and private but as one based on the relevance of the past to the present: Both history and collective memory are publicly available social facts—the former “dead,” the latter “living.” Halbwachs alternately referred to autobiographical memory, historical memory, history, and collective memory. Autobiographical memory is memory of those events that we ourselves expe- rience (though those experiences are shaped by group memberships), while historical memory is memory that reaches us only through historical records. History is the remembered past to which we no longer have an “organic” relation—the past that is no longer an important part of our lives—while collective memory is the active past that forms our identities.

While rightly credited with establishing “collective memory” both as a concept and as a subject for sociolog-

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Collective Memor y