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There is power in a union? Union members' preferences and the conditional effect of labour unions on left parties in different welfare state programmes
[journal article]
Abstract This article studies the effect of labour unions on policy-making in six different parts of the welfare state (passive and active labour market policy, employment protection, old-age pensions, health care and education) in OECD countries after 1980 with a two-level strategy: At the micro-level, we i... view more
This article studies the effect of labour unions on policy-making in six different parts of the welfare state (passive and active labour market policy, employment protection, old-age pensions, health care and education) in OECD countries after 1980 with a two-level strategy: At the micro-level, we investigate union members' preferences. Ordered logit regression analyses indicate that union members favour generous social policies more strongly than non-members. Moreover, this effect is stronger for programmes closely related to the labour market than for programmes without a strong labour market link. At the macro-level, we investigate the conditional effect of unions on left parties expecting the former to push the left towards more generous labour market-related (but not towards less-labour market-related) programmes. Regression analyses essentially provide evidence for such a relationship. Overall, unions have been powerful in promoting their members' social policy preferences via left parties in government but their power is recently vanishing.... view less
Keywords
ISSP; trade union; power; political left; party; welfare state; OECD member country; political participation
Classification
Sociology of Work, Industrial Sociology, Industrial Relations
Political Process, Elections, Political Sociology, Political Culture
Free Keywords
ISSP1985 ; ISSP1990 ; ISSP1996 ; ISSP2006 ; ISSP2016
Document language
English
Publication Year
2023
Page/Pages
p. 89-109
Journal
British Journal of Industrial Relations, 61 (2023) 1
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12665
ISSN
1467-8543
Status
Published Version; peer reviewed
Licence
Creative Commons - Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0