Environmental Activism as Collective Action

The literature on environmental activism has failed to produce a model of individual decision making explicitly linked to the logic of collective action. To remedy this problem, this article adapts the collective interest model developed by Finkel, Muller, and Opp to explain protest behavior and argues environmental activism is a function of citizen beliefs about collective benefits, the ability to influence collective outcomes, and the selective costs/benefits of participation. The author tests the hypotheses of the collective interest model using data from a survey of 460 residents of a coastal watershed and national data on 1,606 respondents from the 1993 General Social Survey Environment Battery. The author’s findings corroborate several central propositions of the collective interest model and provide a theoretical account of environmental activism that synthesizes many previous results.

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