collective action
Definition
Collective action refers to efforts undertaken by group members to improve their group's conditions, ranging from peaceful street protests and petitions to violent forms of confrontation and property destruction. The Social Identity Model of Collective Action identifies social identity strength, perceived injustice, and group efficacy as the principal psychological predictors of mobilisation, and this framework has been extended to explain why some populations resist democratic backsliding while others remain indifferent or actively support authoritarian consolidation, as in the contrasting cases of Russia and Israel. Counter-protests that violently disrupt social change movements constitute one form of collective action, and across studies in Australia, Thailand, and the United States, violent counter-protest tactics were found to heighten public perceptions of free-speech suppression and increase sympathy for the original movement rather than undermining it. Engagement in election-related collective action also carries consequences beyond the protest itself: longitudinal data from the 2024 UK General Election show that participants who had invested heavily in collective action and whose local candidate lost did not experience the post-election increase in political trust observed among other voters.
Sources: Lavie-Driver & Linden (2026), Selvanathan et al. (2026), Marinthe et al. (2026)
Related Terms
- authoritarianism (2 shared articles)
- longitudinal (1 shared article)
- elections (1 shared article)
- political trust (1 shared article)
- intergroup relations (1 shared article)
- counter-movements (1 shared article)
- free speech (1 shared article)
- social change (1 shared article)
- propaganda (1 shared article)
- Russia (1 shared article)
- Ukraine (1 shared article)
- values (1 shared article)
- value-instantiating beliefs (1 shared article)
- social identity (1 shared article)
- democratic backsliding (1 shared article)
- collective memory (1 shared article)
Applications
Collective Action and Political Trust
Political trust and collective action are linked longitudinally, with prior engagement in election-related collective action moderating how trust changes after an electoral outcome. Using data collected before and after the 2024 UK General Election, unsuccessful collective action, defined as canvassing or campaigning for a local candidate who then lost, was associated with a failure to gain the post-election trust increase observed among other participants. This suggests that when collective action does not produce the desired political result, it may weaken citizens' confidence in the responsiveness of democratic institutions rather than strengthen it.
Sources: Marinthe et al. (2026)
Collective Action and Social Identity
Social identity shapes both the likelihood and the direction of collective action. Stronger identification with a group that construes democratic backsliding as an injustice is associated with higher perceived group efficacy and greater mobilisation, while identities that valorise authoritarian stability can suppress resistance entirely. In Russia, identity reframing tied to collective memories of 1990s economic chaos has reduced appraisals of injustice, illustrating how the same psychological pathway that drives collective action can be redirected to prevent it.
Sources: Lavie-Driver & Linden (2026)
Collective Action and Collective Memory
Collective memory shapes whether groups perceive their conditions as unjust and whether they believe coordinated effort can succeed, two conditions the extended SIMCA model identifies as antecedents to collective action. Memories that portray past resistance as effective feed into higher group efficacy, while sanitised or selectively glorified memories of authoritarian periods suppress it, as the Russian case illustrates. In Israel, divergent group memories of the Holocaust and of Israel's political founding produced opposite mobilisation outcomes in response to the same judicial reform proposals, with secular Jews and Arab citizens acting on sharply different assessments of injustice and efficacy.
Sources: Lavie-Driver & Linden (2026)
