How do individual decisions influence the success of collective action?

How do individual decisions influence the success of collective action?

In the first chapter of her book, Lisa Baldez explores 20th century Chile as a case study to examine how women mobilize en masse for a political subject. She studies the concept of tipping, or a cascade of mobilization, and the circumstances under which that occurs. For women, Baldez alleges that tipping occurs when the timing is right (during a partisan political realignment) and when the framing is right (conditions can be perceived in gendered terms and cause women to take action). Baldez points out that women are not united by all issues, but they are united because they have often been cast aside as political outsiders and excluded from decision making. 

Collective action is composed of hundreds or thousands of individual decisions. The decision to protest, to donate, to mobilize by making phone calls or knocking on doors or voting occurs at the individual level. Influencing all those individuals to mobilize at once is the essence of the collective action problem, one of the most commonly discussed problems in political science. As it turns out, it is really hard to get people to do stuff. People really don't want to do stuff. If a whole bunch of individuals are adversely affected by a new policy but would rather do nothing than do something, then there will be no collective action. Individual decisions are collective action at the most granular level. However, as Baldez explains, individual decisions are not made in a vacuum. People consider whether or not to mobilize based on whether they think other people will mobilize. This is where tipping, the mobilization cascade, comes into play. When a person thinks that enough other people are likely to join a protest, for example, then that person is more likely to join that protest too. People showing up to a protest is collective action, built by a bunch of individual but interconnected decisions. This is another reason why collective action is so hard: you don't necessarily know what everyone else is thinking or doing. Your threshold for protesting may be that 100 other people have to be protesting before you do, but you might not have any way to find out how many people will be protesting without actually going to the protest yourself, so you probably just stay home. Collective action is much more successful when everyone has good information and can make a more informed individual decision. Collective action works better when people all make their decisions on the same good information. 

The Hong Kong protests are a fantastic example of good information being available to everyone (who is involved in the protests) working in favor of collective action. The protestors there, as we have discussed and seen in this course, act as a unit to extraordinary effect, even though the protests are seas of thousands of people. They part for ambulances, they create supply chains, they use the "be water" technique to move fluidly and avoid conflict with riot police. If every individual protestor was doing their own thing, the protests there would be much more chaotic, if they even occurred on this scale. But because the organizers are good at disseminating information and getting everyone on the same page, all of the individuals are able to act as a unit instead of just a conglomeration of individuals all doing their own thing.