State Labor Laws and Government Responsiveness to Public Opinion

• In Event: Policy Adoption and Responsiveness: A View From the States

Abstract

Debate persists among political scientists over the extent to which economic inequalities, political institutions, organized interests, and voters’ cognitive biases push policymaking “off-center” and diminish the degree that majority preferences are registered in government policy. We contribute to this debate by investigating the possible effects labor laws (that influence organized labor’s political power) in the American states have on government responsiveness to public opinion. Importantly, we separate out the effects of laws applying to public and private sector unions to study their distinct impact. Drawing on newly developed measures of public opinion and policy liberalism in the states over time, we employ a difference-in-difference estimation strategy and find that state labor laws impact responsiveness in different ways. Specifically, states with “right-to-work” laws that diminish private sector unions’ membership and political power adopt economic policies that are more conservative than public opinion would predict. By contrast, states with mandatory collective bargaining laws for public sector employees chose economic policies that are more liberal than public opinion predicts. In short, laws that weaken private sector unions allow economic policy to be pushed to the right, while laws that strengthen public sector unions allow it to be pushed to the left. We also probe possible mechanisms and show that the empirical results are consistent across different model specifications and measurement techniques. Our findings have important implications for understanding the effects of organized labor (and laws that increase or diminish its political influence) on the functioning of American democracy.

Authors

• Daniel R. DiSalvo, CUNY-City College of New York

• Patrick Flavin, Baylor University

• Michael T. Hartney, Boston College