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Reducing Unequal Representation: The Impact of Labor Unions on Legislative Responsiveness in the U.S. Congress

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 July 2020

Michael Becher Open the ORCID record for Michael Becher [Opens in a new window]  and
Daniel Stegmueller Open the ORCID record for Daniel Stegmueller [Opens in a new window]
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Abstract

It has long been recognized that economic inequality may undermine the principle of equal responsiveness that lies at the core of democratic governance. A recent wave of scholarship has highlighted an acute degree of political inequality in contemporary democracies in North America and Europe. In contrast to the view that unequal responsiveness in favor of the affluent is nearly inevitable when income inequality is high, we argue that organized labor can be an effective source of political equality. Focusing on the paradigmatic case of the U.S. House of Representatives, our novel dataset combines income-specific estimates of constituency preferences based on 223,000 survey respondents matched to roll-call votes with a measure of district-level union strength drawn from administrative records. We find that local unions significantly dampen unequal responsiveness to high incomes: a standard deviation increase in union membership increases legislative responsiveness towards the poor by about six to eight percentage points. As a result, in districts with relatively strong unions legislators are about equally responsive to rich and poor Americans. We rule out alternative explanations using flexible controls for policies, institutions, and economic structure, as well as a novel instrumental variable for unionization based on history and geography. We also show that the impact of unions operates via campaign contributions and partisan selection.

Information

Type
Special Section: Working Class Blues or Reds?
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , March 2021 , pp. 92 - 109
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

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Footnotes

A list of permanent links to Supplemental Materials provided by the authors precedes the References section.

*

Data replication sets are available in Harvard Dataverse at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/L6KU0D

For valuable feedback on previous versions, we are grateful to John Ahlquist, Lucio Baccaro, Pablo Beramendi, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, Konstntin Käppner, David Rueda, Patricia Kirkland, Jonas Pontusson, Elizabeth Rigby, Karine Van Der Straeten, and participants at the annual meetings of APSA (2017); MPSA (2018); University of Geneva workshops on Unions and the Politics of Inequality (2018) and Unequal Democracies (2019); IPErG seminar at University of Barcelona; the Instituto Carlos III-Juan March; the Nuffield Politics seminar at University of Oxford; IE University; and IAST. Becher acknowledges IAST funding from the French National Research Agency (ANR) under the Investments for the Future (Investissements d’Avenir) program, grant ANR-17-EURE-0010. Stegmueller’s research was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2017S1A3A2066657).

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Supplementary material: Link

Becher and Stegmueller Dataset

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https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/L6KU0D
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