Becher, Michael and Stegmueller, Daniel (2021) Reducing Unequal Representation: The Impact of Labor Unions on Legislative Responsiveness in the U.S. Congress. Perspectives on Politics, vol. 19 (n° 1). pp. 92-109.

Full text not available from this repository.
Official URL : http://iast.fr/pub/125674
Identification Number : 10.1017/S153759272000208X

Abstract

It has long been recognized that economic inequality may undermine the principle of equal responsiveness that lies at the core of democratic governance. A recent wave of scholarship has highlighted an acute degree of political inequality in contemporary democracies in North America and Europe. In contrast to the view that unequal responsiveness in favor of the affluent is nearly inevitable when income inequality is high, we argue that organized labor can be an effective source of political equality. Focusing on the paradigmatic case of the U.S. House of Representatives, our novel dataset combines income-specific estimates of constituency preferences based on 223,000 survey respondents matched to roll-call votes with a measure of district-level union strength drawn from administrative records. We find that local unions significantly dampen unequal responsiveness to high incomes: a standard deviation increase in union membership increases legislative responsiveness towards the poor by about six to eight percentage points. As a result, in districts with relatively strong unions legislators are about equally responsive to rich and poor Americans. We rule out alternative explanations using flexible controls for policies, institutions, and economic structure, as well as a novel instrumental variable for unionization based on history and geography. We also show that the impact of unions operates via campaign contributions and partisan selection.

Item Type: Article
Language: English
Date: March 2021
Refereed: Yes
Place of Publication: New York‎
Subjects: B- ECONOMIE ET FINANCE
Divisions: TSE-R (Toulouse)
Site: UT1
Date Deposited: 01 Jun 2021 08:56
Last Modified: 02 Mar 2022 10:06
OAI Identifier: oai:tse-fr.eu:125674
URI: https://publications.ut-capitole.fr/id/eprint/43581
View Item