In Why Men Rebel Ted Gurr contends that the potential for collective violence can be determined by assessing certain psychological variables in groups or classes in society. Groups's shares of social goods affect their feelings of relative deprivation. Relative deprivation is defined as the discontent that results from the perceived discrepancy between a group's expectations for their conditions in life and their ability to obtain those conditions; Gurr's focus in on economic deprivation. This focus would have been ineffective, however, in predicting the propensity for violence that erupted into the worst episode of civil disobedience in recent memory: the riots caused by the Rodney King verdict.
Gurr (1970) bases his contention that material deprivation is a prerequisite to collective violence by creating a composite typology of "welfare values." These values relate to physical well-being and self-realization. Welfare values are the basic needs which are the most meaningful to human beings: "They include the physical goods of life--food, shelter, health services, and physical comforts--and the development and use of physical and mental abilities" (Gurr, 1970, p. 25). People require a basic level of economic goods to support their welfare needs. Gurr (1970) claims that people are particularly sensitive to declines in economic goods, especially those segments of society that are already living close to the proverbial edge, "When economic values are inflexible and men live close to the subsistence margin, almost any marginal economic decline can precipitate violence" (p. 131).
Gurr (1970) contends that a group's potential for collective violence can be determined by analyzing changes in the group's means for obtaining social goods. Two methods are suggested for this analysis: "One method for assessing the psychological variables is survey research; another is systematic inference from narrative and aggregate statisti...