The Organizational Roots of Collective Action: Why Some Countries are Politically More Organized Than Others

Citizens’ opportunities for political participation are partly shaped by the organizational tissue provided by collective action organisations. Unions organise access to labour market policy negotiations, movements provide opportunities to voice concerns ‘via the street’, churches facilitate moral coordination among citizens, charities allow for the realisation of goals largely by-passing the state and professional associations gives citizens a meaningful instrument to direct their expertise for a collective good. The quality and size of the collective action sector varies a great deal between countries; why are large numbers of people member of politically active associations in some countries whereas in other countries only a minority of citizens engage themselves politically through organized groups? We theoretically develop a meso- and macro-level hypothesis, and control for various micro-level factors. At the meso-level, we theoretical rely on the relation to the party system: we expect that types of organizations (unions, churches, movements) with links to mainstream parties enjoy higher levels of trust than types with links to niche parties or those without a relevant party-connection. At the macro-level, we theoretically assume that the institutionalisation of the collective action sector takes time. We hypothesize that the longer a country has been effectively democratic, the larger the trust in collective action organisations is. We expect that this is a long-running tendency that it takes multiple decades to build trust among citizens (but that it can decrease relatively fast). We study our expectations on the basis of survey-questions on trust in several types of collective action organizations , a number waves of the EVS/WVS in a relatively large number of countries. Our findings indicate cross-country inequalities in the sense that citizens in some countries have choice among a plethora of reliable political intermediaries but in other countries citizens can hardly effectively channel their political preferences, broadly understood, via collective action organisations.