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C H A P T E R T H R E E Socializing Costs: Patronage and Political Participation JUST AS PUBLIC POLICIES IMPOSE COSTS and confer benefits, so does political participation. However, to the individual or group considering political advocacy, the costs and benefits of participation are not everywhere and always equal. Some issues are inherently harder to organize around than are others. Policies that seek to provide public goods pose particular mobilization problems. If most people are rational, and it is rational not to give money or time to a collective cause unless compelled to do so, how do organizations advocating public goods generate the resources needed to accomplish their aims? One obvious way is to secure institutional patronage . By socializing the burden of collective action, institutional patronage reduces the costs to the individual movement sympathizer, thereby making participation easier. Interestingly, gun control has never lacked for institutional supporters: It has had many potential patrons. They just have not catalyzed a movement. This chapter will explore why. The most important patronage goods are money and volunteer labor; but other goods are also important, including expert advice, legitimization , and coordination and leadership services. Institutional patronage has three characteristics: (1) it is guaranteed, or understood to be provided , from one year to the next; (2) its amount does not fluctuate with events or circumstances; and (3) it is generated through a routinized process , such as taxation, regular membership dues, or interest on investments . By providing a steady stream of diverse resources, patrons both catalyze movements and allow them to expand. Gun control advocates have had difficulty securing patronage resources from each of the three principal sources: government bureaucracies, voluntary associations, and philanthropic foundations. Government patrons are important because they have access to a reliable stream of tax dollars and because their imprimatur conveys credibility to voluntary organizations . Associational patrons are important because they are able to divert proceeds from social-capital building into financial and human capital necessary for movement expansion. Philanthropic patrons are important because they are presumed to have more flexibility than government agencies and to be more likely to take risky or controversial positions. 74 • Chapter Three The argument of this chapter is as follows. Gun rights supporters have benefited from both governmental and privately generated patronage. Recognizing the importance of institutionalized patronage, gun rights supporters have sought to ensure that those benefits did not accrue to gun control organizations. Thus, the NRA and its allies have pursued a “defund, delegitimize, and deprive” strategy to prevent state bureaucracies and private organizations from providing resources to gun control organizations. The NRA and its allies have been aided in this quest by a tax regime that systematically disadvantages voluntary organizations that are trying to secure public goods. This chapter will demonstrate that the battle over gun control has been as much over patronage as over policy. It is a battle that the gun rights side has largely won. Generally speaking, gun control groups have been unable to secure significant institutional patronage from three particularly important sources: the government, women’s voluntary associations, and philanthropic foundations. However , as demonstrated in the counterfactual cases below, when patronage has been secured, gun control participation has increased and the “movement ” has gained momentum. EXTERNAL PATRONAGE: THE STATE As I argued in chapter 2, government agencies play an important role in solving the collective action problem. Enterprising legislators and bureaucrats have provided direct and indirect assistance to issue entrepreneurs working on causes such as women’s rights and smoking reduction. State patronage can take several forms: financial capital, such as grants and contracts; human capital, such as the leadership skills of government employees ; and political capital, such as endorsements and authoritative data that lend weight to outside advocates’ efforts. Government agencies do not merely receive interest-group pressures; they also adjudicate among them. When a government agency takes sides in a political debate, it provides resources not otherwise available and signals to members of the concerned public which side warrants their support. In the realm of gun control, advocates faced two tasks. First, they had to remove state patronage from the opposition: The U.S. government for decades provided direct subsidies to the principal gun rights organization, the NRA. Second, gun control supporters sought to secure state patronage for themselves. The effort of gun control advocates to defund the opposition provisionally succeeded, but only after decades of work; the effort to secure state patronage for themselves proved less successful...

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