6 significantly in the degree to which they encourage norms of reciprocity, with corresponding effects on whether these norms actually emerge and persist. Opportunistic behavior by group leaders is a frequent reason for collective failure.

To control this, groups that successfully manage common resources, like those that successfully delegate development challenges to government, have a second feature: organizational characteristics that allow members to replace leaders who fail to pursue the collective interests of the group. Based on her review of numerous irrigation systems, fisheries and other collectively managed resource systems, Ostrom (1990, 2000) argues that members must be able to select their own monitors. Individuals affected by a resource regime should also be able to participate in making and modifying its rules. Bardhan (1999) finds that the quality of irrigation maintenance is significantly lower where farmers believe rules of access are made by a local elite. In their theoretical analysis, Bates and Bianco (1990) conclude that leaders are less able to curb free-riding when group members cannot credibly commit to a response to leader shirking.

# **Political parties and collective action**

In most countries, citizens cannot easily act collectively in support of development policies over which they share common preferences. This is not a question of preference heterogeneity. Every country exhibits groups of citizens who prefer similar policies, even if between-group preferences diverge. Nevertheless, even groups with homogeneous preferences are incapable of collective action. Moreover, citizens should all prefer to limit corrupt behavior – excessive rent-seeking – by government officials and yet, in many countries, they cannot. One important reason for this lies with the political parties in these countries, which are not organized to promote members’ collective action.

Political parties’ role in solving citizen collective action problems has long been recognized. Kitschelt (2007 p. 525) emphasizes that in mass democracies with a universal franchise, individuals require “intermediary vehicles of coordination that help them to overcome collective action problems. . .” Aldrich (1995) introduced the idea that parties solve voters’ collective action problem of trying to hold multiple politicians jointly accountable for their actions. Cox and McCubbins (1994) view parties as a solution to collective action problems inside the legislature. However, although political parties are ubiquitous in both democracies and non-democracies, they often do not promote the collective interests of adherents.

Research on political parties rightly emphasizes the central question of whether and how cleavages in society – between rich and poor, secular and sectarian, rural and urban, north and south, Catholic and Protestant, etc. – are manifested in party systems. Lipset and Rokkan (1967) were the first to link the diversity of party systems to the interaction of social cleavages and the particular historical and institutional circumstances that lead elites to emphasize certain cleavages over others. Boix (2007) reviews the body of scholarship flowing from this insight, deploying more rigorous theoretical frameworks to weave together the specific roles of institutions, particularly electoral, and of history, particularly the constraints and opportunities confronting elite decision makers, to explain the emergence and evolution of parties.

Scholars have not, however, focused as much on the particular organizational challenges of forming political parties that facilitate collective action by members, though all