[lbo-talk] unions & voting

[Doug Henwood]

Nathan's already offered evidence on the union influence on voting, 
and Ruy Teixeira confirmed my sense that union membership - even 
after controlling for all other variables - made people more likely 
to vote Dem. Ruy sent an NBER paper by Richard Freeman on the topic. 
Here's the abstract:


>What Do Unions Do ... to Voting?
>Richard B. Freeman
>NBER Working Paper No. 9992
>September 2003
>JEL No. J0, J5
>ABSTRACT
>This paper uses data from four different data sets to examine the 
>union impact on the turnout of members and their support for 
>union-preferred candidates. It rejects the claim that the union 
>share of the electorate rose massively in the 1990s. It finds that 
>union members are about 12 percentage points more likely to vote 
>than non-union members and nonunion persons in union households are 
>modestly more likely to vote than persons in nonunion households, 
>but shows that most of the higher rate of turnout of unionists is 
>due to socioeconomic factors that differentiate union members from 
>others. With respect to voting preferences, union members are more 
>likely to vote for a Democrat for the House or Presidency than 
>demographically comparable nonunion voters, largely because union 
>members have attitudes and voting inclinations favorable to the 
>Democrats and to liberalism prior to a given campaign. Finally, the 
>study identifies a sizable group of nonunion persons with pro-union 
>attitudes that unions could potentially influence to maintain the 
>union impact on elections even with declines in union density.