Sometimes social science is born from observing simple
puzzles. Consider this one: In China, many attractive temples charge admission
fees that are obviously higher than is needed for maintenance and the feeding
of monks, but other temples do not. What is going on? The fees are for the
local government, which sees a famous temple as a way to get revenue without
taxing the local people. But what is convenient for the local government is a
moral outrage for the monks and many locals, who will sometimes successfully
mobilize against the fees. The interesting question is why they can defeat the
fee-collecting government officials sometimes but not always.
In a recent article in Administrative Science Quarterly, Lori Qingyuan Yue, Jue Wang, and Botao Yang look at this question to find out how
popular movements based on moral and religious principles contend with
pressures from the government and market forces. The battle is unequal because
the government has the power of formal authority and markets have the persuasive
power of money. The popular movement has none of these, only moral outrage. The
contention is particularly unequal in an authoritarian state, where outrage
does not translate into power through elections, and illegal forms of protest
can be dealt with harshly.
The answer to this question, like many questions about
society, lies in how organizations work. The government organization is one
side of the story, and there the main issue is that it has many layers – local
and central parts of the state. The central state cannot govern locales
effectively and prefers to stay away, but it also wants economic development
and social peace. Knowing this, the local government officials can ratchet up
fees when their areas are economically backward, but they need to reduce them
when the protests are loud enough to catch the attention of the central state.
The other side of the story is the organization of protests.
Here, the religious leaders did the obvious thing – founded an organization
with the specific goal of reducing fees. But protesters don’t just make their
own organizations, they also use existing ones. Here, the press was used,
though in an authoritarian state the companies that hire journalists and
publish newspapers or TV programs are not the most useful. They are too
accountable to the state to be able to do much. Instead, the effective
organizations are the providers of social media, because they allow the protestors
to make themselves heard both by other potential protestors and by the state,
which monitors social media protests to understand social unrest and censor its
expression.
So a battle may look like a contest between a union of
markets and local governments on the one side and the moral outrage of
individuals on the other, but that is not its true nature. There are
organizations on both sides, and this is true for any conflict that each side
really wants to win.
As I suggested in the title, the conflict between markets
and morality is an old one. Two gospels mention Jesus driving merchants out of
the temple and overturning their tables. It is a good story, but it is no
longer how conflicts are won. People don’t get results; organizations do.
