In this project a model of instrumental and normative incentives for participation in collective political action will be evaluated in dynamic and comparative perspective and tested against alternative explanations. The data are from national samples and protest-prone community sub-samples in three countries, Peru, Israel, and West Germany, that differ substantially in regard to macro economic, social, and political conditions, as well as in regard to aggregate levels of legal and illegal collective action. Two-wave panel surveys are used to determine the structure of causality between attitudes and behaviors. The researcher's approach to the explanation of collective political action, defined broadly to encompass both legal and illegal behaviors by which groups may exert influence on public policy, is innovative theoretically and methodologically. The model that is being developed comprises two general motivations for participation in collective political action: outcome-oriented rational choice and adherence to norms of appropriate behavior; and it distinguishes further between two sources of rational motivation, private outcome incentives and collective outcome incentives, and between two sources of normative motivation, personal moral norms and social norms. This `rationality- norms' model is an alternative to grievance and relative deprivation explanations, and it subsumes other more ad hoc social-psychological approaches. The innovative methodological features of the approach are, first, a `maximum difference' data collection design that affords powerful tests of the cross-national generalizability of results across countries differing substantially in economic, social, and political characteristics and enables the investigators to bridge the micro and macro levels of analysis; second, a multi-sample design within countries that permits a determination of the extent to which relationships between attitudes and behaviors are conditioned by facilitative social environments; and, third, a longitudinal data analysis design that takes into account possibilities of reciprocal causation and allows for the estimation of both lagged and simultaneous effects between variables.
