Political Trust and Government Unionization

• In Event: Elections and Public Opinion in State Politics

Abstract

Political Trust and Government Unionization

Political trust is often said to be essential to sustain democratic government. In the United States, there has been a well-documented decline in political trust in the mass public over the last sixty years. Without trust, scholars have argued, government cannot undertake major policy initiatives that would benefit citizens (Hetherington 1998, 2004).

In this paper, we contribute to the study of trust by examining the impact of the adoption of state public sector collective bargaining laws in the 1960s and 1970s. The reason the unionization of public employees is likely to negatively impact trust, we argue, is that the introduction of collective bargaining has been associated with a loss of political authority (Moe 2009), accountability (Howard 2023) and government responsiveness (DiSalvo et al. 2023) resulting from that unionization. Once collective bargaining is permitted, unions representing public employee form and negotiate contracts which structure and constrains how government will carry out its core functions and at what cost. Collective bargaining is thus directly related to the performance and cost of government, which citizens assess negatively.

Various other arguments have been put forth to explain the erosion of trust in government. Nonetheless, we think that the factors adduced to date do not fully explain the large decline in political trust documented in the postwar era. In addition, and contrary to the existing literature, which focuses almost exclusively on the national government, we argue that insufficient attention has been paid to the state governments as the object of citizen’s trust evaluations.

Using an index of public sector collective bargaining laws and ANES survey data, we find that the introduction of collective bargaining laws negatively impacted political trust. We leverage the differences in the timing of states labor laws, panel data that coincide with the years when states enacted collective bargaining laws, and several placebo tests to show that citizens in unionizing states report diminished trust in government after collective bargaining laws are adopted compared to citizens in the same states prior to those changes.

Our paper thus makes key contributions to the literature on trust as well as changing the focus of the literature on public sector unions, which to date has focused primarily on economic costs. As distinct from the existing literature, we seek to tease out some of the larger long-term political consequences of the adoption of collective bargaining for public employees on citizens attitudes towards state governments.




Bibliography

DiSalvo, Daniel, Patrick Flavin, and Michael Hartney. "State labor laws and government responsiveness to public opinion." Political Research Quarterly (2023): 10659129221145938.

Hetherington, Marc J. "The political relevance of political trust." American political science review 92, no. 4 (1998): 791-808.

Hetherington, Marc J. Why trust matters: Declining political trust and the demise of American liberalism. Princeton University Press, 2005.

Howard, Philip K. Not Accountable: Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions. Simon and Schuster, 2023.

Moe, Terry M. "Collective bargaining and the performance of the public schools." American Journal of political science 53, no. 1 (2009): 156-174.

Authors

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

• Michael T. Hartney, Stanford University

• Patrick Flavin, Baylor University