Experiments for Web Science: Examining the Effect of the Internet on Collective Action

The shift of much of political life on to the Internet and WWW has implications for understanding of political behaviour, particularly people’s willingness to undertake collective action and organise around public goods. Web-based experiments are an under-used methodology to identify and investigate these Internet effects. This paper reports on two such experiments, one in the laboratory and the other in the field, which explored how one particular characteristic of the Internet – the ability to feed real-time information about the behaviour of others back to an individual user – can affect people’s incentives to act collectively. The results suggest that information about high numbers of other participants positively affect an individual’s willingness to participate, while information about low numbers of other participants can have a negative effect, suggesting that a revision of the ‘logic ’ of collective action may be necessary for the Internet age. Collective action has been a key puzzle of political science since the 1960s. In The Logic of Collective Action, Mancur Olson (1965) put forward a thesis about when individuals can be incentivized to act collectively. He argued that, when organising around collective goods, ‘small groups are more efficient and viable than large ones ’ and that if they are not, they need to be able to coerce their members or provide selective incentives to contributors. Generations of social scientists have worried over the implications of Olson’s argument, which skews the influence of interest groups, limiting the ability of large groups to represent their interests. More recently, a number of studies have suggested that larger groups may actually find it easier to form, as their size makes it more likely they will be able to attain a ‘critical mass ’ of activists who organise around public goods (Marwell and Oliver