Do Unions Shape Political Ideologies at Work?

Johannes Matzat and Aiko Schmeißer

No 719, Working Papers from University of Heidelberg, Department of Economics

Abstract: Labor unions' largest potential for political influence likely arises from their direct connection to millions of individuals at the workplace. There they may change the political views of both unionizing workers as well as of their non-unionizing management which is arguably the most relevant out-group. In this paper, we analyze the impact of unionization on workers' and managers' campaign contributions at the workplace over the 1980-2016 period in the United States. Therefore, we combine establishment-level union election data with transaction-level campaign contributions to federal and local candidates. In stacked Difference-in-Differences models, we find that unionization results in a leftward shift of campaign contributions. Unionization increases the support for Democrats relative to Republicans not only among workers but also among managers. To test the validity of these findings, we perform Regression Discontinuity exercises which show that there are no differential trends along placebo vote share cutoffs and that the results hold when comparing increasingly close elections. Moreover, we provide evidence that our results are not driven by compositional changes of the workforce.

Date: 2022-09-16
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-lab and nep-pol
Note: This paper is part of http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/view/schriftenreihen/sr-3.html
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bsz:16-heidok-321622 Frontdoor page on HeiDOK (text/html)
https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver ... er_%202022_dp719.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:awi:wpaper:0719

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Heidelberg, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Gabi Rauscher ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).