The Importance of Political Systems for Trade Union Membership, Coverage, and Influence

An animated introduction to an article published in the British Journal of Industrial Relations by John Budd and Ryan Lamare. We uniquely theorize three channels through which a political system can shape unionization in the workplace independent of ideology. We then use multiple European data sets to test the relationship between political and employee representation using multivariate analyses across more than 25 countries. We find that increased political representativeness, measured by lower disproportionality and the presence of multiparty coalitions, is a statistically significant predictor of a greater likelihood of individual trade union membership, coverage, and influence, while competitive fragmentation, measured by greater numbers of political parties, is associated with weakened collective voice.
Published article: https://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12575
Non-paywall version: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.c...
Version of this animation without background music:    • The Importance of Political Systems f...