Common Goods

Collective Action for Public Goods

Political scientists began to study the role of groups in politics at the beginning of the 20th century. With time, a scholarly tradition became established, and a group theory was proposed that implicitly assumes that whenever all the individuals in a group have the same aim, they will all act to achieve that aim. Mancur Olson, in his book The Logic of Collective Action, was the first to argue that this apparently obvious assertion is in general untrue for public goods.

Olson's argument is that the attribute of nonexcludability implies that no individual member of a group has an incentive to contribute voluntarily to the provision of a public good, as each would get his or her part, in any case, once it came into existence. Irrespective of the nature of the group (i.e., a rural community, a town, a union, or a nation), this free riding behavior may spread among individuals, so that a group may be unable to give rise to a [Page 308]single unit of public good, no matter how important it might be for the group. Consequently, the existence of a public good depends on the capacity of the group to prevent free riding, which means detecting and punishing people who do not cooperate in its provision. This is easiest when the number of group affiliates is small, because they know each other personally, interact frequently, and can regularly monitor their respective actions. Because of this capacity to surmount opportunistic behavior, small groups are privileged and are able to activate and stabilize. Large groups, on the contrary, are anonymous, so that it may be difficult for partners to detect and punish free riding. This is why large groups are difficult to mobilize and may remain latent.

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