Collective Action in State Building, Past and Present

Summary

I report on a comparative study of degrees of collective action in 30 premodern states and 30 contemporary nation-states. Contrary to the notion of democratic reform in state-building, I found roughly similar proportions of more and less collective (autocratic) states in the two samples. I propose a hypothesis for the failure of democratic reform drawn from collective action theory.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Power from Below: Collectivity and Heterarchy in Global Perspective

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 14804