Collective Action
Public choice, an important subdiscipline
in the field of political theory, seeks to understand how people and societies
make decisions affecting their collective lives. Relying heavily on theoretical
models of decision making, public choice postulates that people act in their
individual interests in making collective decisions. As it happens, however,
reality does not mirror theory, and people often act contrary to what the
principal public choice models suggest. In this book, Russell Hardin looks
beyond the models to find out why people choose to act together in situations
that the models find quite hopeless. He uses three constructs of modern
political economy--public goods, the Prisoner's Dilemma, and game theory--to
test public choice theories against real world examples of collective action.
These include movements important in American society in the past few
decades--civil rights, the Vietnam War, women's rights, and environmental
concerns. This classic work on public choice will be of interest to
theoreticians and graduate students in the fields of public choice, political
economy, or political theory--and to those in other disciplines who are
concerned with the problem of collective action in social contexts.
