Labor Organization and Electoral Participation in Industrial Democracies

Abstract

The literature on the determinants of electoral participation has paid little attention to the role of labor organization. Adopting the familiar heuristic of costs and benefits, we argue that aggregate rates of turnout will be affected strongly by the strength of the labor movement. This hypothesis is tested using cross-sectional and pooled time series data for nineteen industrial democracies and the fifty American states. The results indicate that the greater the share of represented by unions, the greater is the turnout. Further analysis indicates that a portion of this effect occurs indirectly through labor's ability to move the ideological position of parties appealing to lowerand middlestatus citizens farther to the left. The implications for the study of electoral politics, democratic theory, and public policy are discussed. he theoretical importance of electoral participation to democratic politics is well understood. The rate of voter participation has been considered a metric by which to judge the legitimacy of democratic institutions (e.g., Piven and Cloward, 1988), an influence on party vote shares (e.g., Nagel and McNulty, 1996), and a determinant of public policies (e.g., Hicks and Misra, 1993; for a review, see Lijphart 1997). Given the salience of turnout, it is not surprising that scholars have devoted considerable attention to the subject. Yet the literature suffers from a general failure to consider that industrial democracies are also capitalist democracies in which political competition is shaped partially by social class. The capacity of the working class, broadly construed, to compete-and thus its incentive to participate-is widely agreed to be a function of the extent to which it is organized. As Przeworski puts it, workers can process their claims only collectively and indirectly through organizations . . . principally trade unions (1985, 11) and, potentially, the political parties beholden to them. As we demonstrate below, labor organization is one of the principal determinants of cross-national and domestic rates of electoral participation.