Culture and Collective Action

Gérard Roland and Yang Xie

Chapter 4 in Contemporary Issues in Development Economics, 2016, pp 44-60 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract Are there cultural underpinnings for differences in types of collective action? One may think that countries that have been successful in establishing democracies earlier than other countries had stronger historical traditions of collective action. If this were true, countries that have not yet established democracies are simply lagging in having their population stage a successful revolution to establish democracy. Looking back in human history, things seem, however, quite different from such a simple scheme. Some countries may have had a stronger tradition of collective action than established democracies, but the aims of that collective action may not necessarily have been to establish democracy. In a recent paper, Gorodnichenko and Roland (2013) presented a model and empirical evidence showing that countries with individualist culture would adopt democracy earlier than countries with collectivist culture, even if the latter possibly had better traditions of collective action. In this chapter, we would like to take a closer look at this question and look for micro-foundations of different types of collective action in different cultures. We focus on the comparison between individualism and collectivism, so it is useful in such an endeavor to compare Chinese and European history, which are relatively well documented.

Keywords: Collective Action; Individualist Culture; Negative Payoff; Chinese History; Contemporary Issue (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:intecp:978-1-137-52974-9_4

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9781137529749

DOI: 10.1057/9781137529749_4

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in International Economic Association Series from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().