Culture and Collective Action

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.