Right to Work or Right to Vote? Labor Policy and American Democracy

• In Event: Federalism and Labor Politics

Abstract

There is growing attention to the role of organized labor in maintaining and expanding democratic institutions in the U.S. In this article, we investigate the effect of right-to-work laws on electoral democracy in the states. We theorize a series of mechanisms by which labor unions contribute to the maintenance and expansion of democratic institutions, including influencing voter partisanship and turnout, increasing racial solidarity among workers, and mobilizing political participation outside of elections. Right-to-work laws, by limiting labor unions’ ability to raise funds, reduce the strength of these mechanisms. Using recent advances in difference-in-differences analysis, we find that right-to-work laws had a substantial negative effect on state level electoral democracy in recent decades, even net of Republican control of government. Although the difficulty of causal identification in this context warrants caution, the findings speak to the importance of organized labor in shaping democratic institutions.

Authors

• Jake M Grumbach, UC Berkeley

• Paul Frymer, Princeton University

• Charlotte Hill, UC Berkeley