Participation in Voluntary Organizations and Group Size

Abstract

Participation in collective action is hard to understand as rational behavior unless strong intrinsic benefits or selective social or economic incentives are assumed. This article describes the Status Competition Model for organizations in which members are motivated to participate for selective social rewards like the status attained from an annual “Medal of Honor.” Status is awarded on the basis of relative voluntary contributions. Using this model, the set of active members and its relation with the size of membership is studied. The number of volunteers is characterized in terms of the individual costs and benefits of participation. It is deduced that active members are necessarily very homogeneous with respect to a one-dimensional parameter of their costs and benefits. Hence the number of active members will be small if members differ nontrivially in their costs and benefits. Under some additional assumptions, it is argued that in similar kinds of organizations, the number of active members is proportional to the square root of the number of members.