For much of the political studies mainstream, collective action is an oddity, not a contribution to democracy. A once influential work on the topic, Why Men Rebel, sought to understand particular types of collective action by inquiring into the mental and emotional state, the sense of ‘relative deprivation’, of people who engage in it.

This reflects an ideological choice. It signals that protest is odd, even pathological, and must, therefore, be related to something unusual happening inside the protestors’ heads. Collective action, for writers who hold this view, is ‘anomic, alienated and outside the polity’. There is nothing self-evident about this: it might be equally valid to assume that normal people always engage in collective action and, therefore, to investigate the mental make-up of passive citizens to explain their alarming lack of civic activity. A detailed study of collective action by Barrington Moore focussed not only on why people rebel, but also on why they obey. By examining the psychology of those who act rather than those who do not, Why Men Rebel declares that passivity is the norm, and action to challenge power the exception which must be explained.

Popular collective action discomforts elites and may appear to them as a threat: to those who are challenged by collective action, it may, therefore, seem the product of a troubled mind. Psychological theories of collective mobilisation might reflect this bias. They may spring from the assumption that existing arrangements are so manifestly in the interests of all that anyone who opposes them must be dysfunctional. But simply to dismiss psychological explanations is to gloss over an important issue.

If citizens were as inclined to combine with others to express themselves as they are to engage in economic activity, collective action would not seem remarkable enough to require explanation.