ABSTRACT
To become more than a conceptual scheme or a mindless accumulation of social facts, research on collective action organizations must be guided by theoretical concerns. This chapter presents a new synthetic theory of association political economy that is tested in the remainder of the book. The next section describes the necessary elements of a scientific theory. These criteria are then applied to develop a theory of collective action organizations that involves both micro- and macrolevel phenomena. Formal definitions of theoretical concepts and their expected relationships are stated here in, but operational measures of variables and empirical tests of these theoretical relationships are depicted in appropriate places in succeeding chapters.
