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Collective Resistance under Authoritarianism: Elite–Mass Strategies in an Experimental Game

Political Behavior volume 38, pages 951–976 (2016)Cite this article

Abstract

We create a collective resistance game in which elites control the distribution of resources if the masses are compliant. However, if the masses unanimously protest elite allocations, they can capture a greater share of resources for themselves. We study how Chinese villagers, randomly assigned to the role of elites and masses, play this game in repeated interactions under varying information conditions. We find significant variation in the extent to which participants gave weight in their decisions to (1) the amount of the elite allocation and (2) their beliefs about the likely choices of fellow group members. Many individuals made their decisions based primarily on the size of the elite allocation, choosing to protest if the elite offer fell below some threshold level. Only a small proportion of the respondents were attuned consistently to the behavioral intentions of fellow group members in deciding whether to protest the elite allocation. This heterogeneity of preferences among participants has significant implications for their prospects of achieving and sustaining collective action. Knowledge of the amount of resources controlled by elites at the start of the game affected mass calculations of the fairness of distributions and increased the frequency of mass protests. However, the elites exploited the decision rule of many mass members by buying off those individuals with the lowest thresholds, thus preempting or dissolving collective action. This research sheds light on elite–mass interactions under authoritarianism, and in particular on contentious politics in contemporary China.

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Notes

  1. During the game, participants are never referred to publically as “elite” or “mass” but instead are identified by the neutral terms, “proposer” and “receiver.” We avoided calling them “elite” or “mass” to ensure their behavior was not be affected by the social connotations associated with these labels.

  2. There is no significant difference in the demographic characteristics of the control groups and treatment groups. The p-values of Mann–Whitney test between the two groups are 0.56 for age, 0.66 for formal education, and 0.69 for gender.

  3. McClendon (2014) is the first to use field experimentation to investigate whether in-group social esteem can motivate individuals to participate in contentious politics, but her research is conducted in a democratic context. As far as we know, our research is the only field lab experiment conducted in an authoritarian setting. For other research using a field lab experimental design, see Whitt and Wilson (2007), and Thöni et al. (2012).

  4. A detailed description of the experimental protocol is provided in the supplementary materials. The data and replication code used in this study are publicly available at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/polbehavior.

  5. In the Assurance Game, All Protest and All Abstain correspond, respectively, to Payoff Dominant and Risk Dominant equilibria (Van Huyck et al. 1990; Myatt et al. 2002; Myatt 2007). Choosing the risk dominant action is a common response in scenarios, such as assurance games, where coordination is important yet players are unsure how other players will behave.

  6. This definition of the baseline income is consistent with many experimental findings using Ultimatum and Trust games in which the participants show an aversion to highly unequal income distributions (Camerer 2003). In our conversations with the village residents, we found they tended to associate the baseline income with an equal distribution of the resources available in the game.

  7. The concept of an “adequate share threshold” is similar to Kuran’s (1991) “revolutionary threshold” or DeNardo’s (1985) critical gap between mass demands and regime outputs.

  8. According to the setup of the experiment, there are three baseline incomes corresponding to the two initial endowment amounts and treatment conditions: (1) for control groups, the baseline income is [0.5 × 10 + 0.5 × 15]/4 = 3.125 Yuan; (2) for treatment groups, the baseline income is (10/4) = 2.5 Yuan or (15/4) = 3.75 Yuan, when the initial endowment is either 10 Yuan or 15 Yuan, respectively. It is worth noting that in the control groups, there were a few cases in which the elite allocated more than 10 Yuan to the mass subjects. In such cases where the elites implicitly revealed the amount of the initial endowment (15 Yuan) to the mass subjects, the baseline income is also 3.75 Yuan.

  9. The remaining 27 persons (34.6 %) gave survey responses that do not conform to one of these three defined categories.

  10. The reason given by the protesters is that they saw in the previous rounds that there were participants willing to protest, so they protested too.

  11. The controls in Table 2 for provincial and town fixed effects explain the slight discrepancy between the treatment effect estimated by the probit model and the treatment effect reported in Table 1.

  12. Another way to measure coordination among mass subjects is to look at the number of mass members who choose to protest as the dependent variable, rather than whether unanimous protest occurred in any given round. The two measures are related, because when 3 members protest, they achieve successful collective resistance (SCR). We use the SCR dummy variable as the main dependent variable because our primary concern is the conditions producing collective action. However, in the Appendix (Table 8) we employ ordered-probit to estimate the model using number of protesters as the dependent variable, and obtain results that are highly consistent with the estimates using SCR.

  13. Recall that in the control groups the mass members make their decisions without knowing how much the elite member retained for himself or herself. For these observations, we use the share retained by the elite in the previous round as a proxy for the masses’ expectation of the elite’s allocation in the current round.

  14. The confidence intervals are set at the 90 % level in Fig. 1. If the significance level is set at the 95 % level, the information treatment is insignificant when the elite keeps less than 45 % of the total endowment.

  15. When collective action stops, there is evidence the elites resume their strategy of reducing the share they offer to the masses as long as it preempts collective action or until the three mass members renew their protest. For example, in Village 2 (T-group), the first collective resistance emerged in round 4, when the elite reduced the share to each mass member to 0.14. In round 7, when the share dropped to 0.14 once more, collective protest immediately resumed. In other groups that never engaged in collective resistance, we find similar behavioral patterns. In most of these groups, when there were individual protests (i.e., one or two chose to protest), the elite member slightly increased the initial offer. But soon thereafter, if collective resistance did not materialize, the elite member steadily reduced initial offers. Through this trial-and-error process, the elite can extract the maximum share of resources in the game.

  16. Note that the combined elite and mass shares of the final payoffs do not sum to 1.0 because when collective action fails, the individual mass members who protested forfeit the initial allocations they received from the elite.

  17. Early experimental studies have found similar phenomena. In a renowned experiment conducted by Haney et al. (1973), the experimental participants were randomly assigned to be either a "guard" or a "prisoner" in a simulated prison. The participants quickly adopted their social roles, with the guards behaving brutally toward the prisoners, and the prisoners becoming passive and deferential.

  18. For two recent publications on government censorship of internet posts and the use of propaganda to control information flow in China, see King et al. (2013) and Huang (2015).

  19. Similarly, relying exclusively on repression is both costly and risky for the ruling class. See Acemoglu et al. (2010), Boix and Svolik (2013), Svolik (2013) for a discussion of how the use of repressive means by ruling elites can create a moral hazard that eventually undermines their authority.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the Editor and three anonymous reviewers for providing numerous insightful suggestions for improvements along the road to publication. We also appreciate the valuable comments we received from Tao Li, Yanhua Deng, Tangbiao Xiao, and the panel participants at the 2014 American Political Science Association annual meeting in Washington DC where an earlier version of this paper was presented. Funding for this research was provided by the Shanghai Pujiang Scholarship (No. PJ0001644) and the Grant for Key Programs Sponsored by the Ministry of Education (No. 13JJD790006).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Dennis Chong

  2. China Institute for Educational Finance Research, Peking University, Beijing, China

    Mingxing Liu

  3. School of Economics, China Center for Economic Studies, Fudan University, Shanghai, China

    Qi Zhang

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  1. Dennis Chong
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  2. Mingxing Liu
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  3. Qi Zhang
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Correspondence to Dennis Chong.

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Appendix

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Chong, D., Liu, M. & Zhang, Q. Collective Resistance under Authoritarianism: Elite–Mass Strategies in an Experimental Game. Polit Behav 38, 951–976 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-016-9342-z

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Keywords

  • Collective action
  • Collective resistance
  • Political protest
  • Contentious politics
  • Authoritarian regimes
  • Elite–mass conflict
  • Assurance game
  • Coordination problem
  • Chinese politics