This investigation tests, cross-nationally, alternative specifications of a rational choice theory of participation in both legal and illegal forms of collective political action, using a maximum-difference research design that entails two-wave panel surveys in the Federal Republic of Germany, Israel, and Peru. The portion of the study supported by the Foundation is the research in Peru. In the research the concept of collective political action is defined broadly to include a variety of behaviors by which groups exert influence on public policy, including actions that are more or less conventional in democracies, such as communal activity and legal protest, as well as illegal acts of civil disobedience and political violence. The generalizability of the hypotheses about determinants of collective political action will be assessed by subjecting them to multiple tests within and across countries, and dynamic relationships will be investigated by means of a panel design. The project will advance the study of political participation in three ways. First, from a theoretical perspective previous research has tended to be somewhat ad hoc. The rational choice models to be tested in this project differ in the extent to which they modify important assumptions of the "economic" approach to rationality. Moreover, the project will determine the extent to which other hypotheses - - especially those of relative deprivation theory and the socioeconomic and resource mobilization approaches - - can be integrated into a rational choice explanation of collective political action. Second, prior research has tended to focus exclusively on the industrial/post-industrial societies of North America and Western Europe, all of which have very high levels of economic development, non-repressive democratic regimes, and relatively homogeneous, "modern" cultures. A major step forward in the field of political participation research will be to determine the extent to which relationships found to hold in advanced industrialized societies can be generalized to less developed countries. Thus, in addition to an instance of an advanced European country, West Germany, the research design includes Israel, a semi-developed country in the Middle East, and Peru, a relatively poor developing country in Latin America. These countries differ in regard to many important political, social, and economic characteristics. They are appropriate sites, therefore, not only for a strong test of the generality of the rational choice model but also for investigation of a variety of contextual interaction effects between macro and micro determinants of collective politcal action. Third, previous studies usually have been cross-sectional and correlational, permitting only weak inferences about causality. The research design in this investigation includes a two-wave panel survey, which allows a test of hypotheses concerning the flow of causality directly and an opportunity to model reciprocal relationships between attitudes and behavior. In summary, the rational choice models tested in this project are more comprehensive, more carefully specified, and more rigorously operationalized than in prior studies. They integrate and subsume a variety of social-psychological variables that have been included in previous investigations of the determinants of political participation.
