The Strength of Unions and Civic Participation in the United States

• In Event: 594 - Section on Political Sociology Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 03. Civic Engagement

Abstract

Civic participation in the United States has attracted significant public attention since Putnam discovered that Americans were not nearly as civically active as they once were. This study builds on Putnam’s and other’s works and attempts to explain why modern Americans are less civically engaged. We argue that the decay of unions is the main cause of the decline of civic engagement in America. Female employment and economic concentration are not discarded; they are intervening variables in our model.
Unions have provided significant opportunities for civic engagement. Unions organize and encourage people to engage in all kinds of political and civic activities. Rises in female employment and economic concentration since have resulted in decreased union membership and weaker unions (because fewer female workers join unions and large corporation discourage employees to join unions). Therefore, female employment and economic concentration negatively affect civic engagement, but they do so by their influence on American unions.
In this study, civic engagement is measured by political participation and associational involvement. We find that the effect of economic concentration on political participation disappears when the effect of unions is introduced into our model. This confirms the assumption that economic concentration affects political participation indirectly. In addition, female employment does not significantly affect political participation, though unions are not in the model. Unions, economic concentration, and female employment are all insignificant. We think this is because we do not distinguish the different kinds of associations.

Authors

• Ya-Feng Lin, Louisiana State University

• Joseph Paul Cleary, Louisiana State University

• Troy Blanchard, Louisiana State University