Collective Action in the Evolution of Pre-Modern States*

Collective action theorists propose that state formation results from the strategic behavior of rational and self-interested actors, both a political elite and those outside the official structure of the state (Levi 1988: 3). The approach taken to collective action research by political scientists provides a potential path for an-thropological inquiry, although, in their publications we find methodological inadequacy in hypothesis testing and a tendency to depend on European and Mediterranean history for sources of comparative data. We attempt to overcome these shortcomings by subjecting the theory to a rigorous attempt at falsification using systematic cross-cultural analysis based on a world-wide sample of societies. We describe the theory, show how we operationalized it for cross-cultural comparative coding, and describe the main re-sults of our analysis