There is power in a union? Union members' preferences and the conditional effect of labour unions on left parties in different welfare state programmes
研究了1980年后OECD国家中工会对六项福利政策的影响，发现工会成员比非成员更支持慷慨的社会政策，且工会通过左翼政党推动与劳动力市场相关的政策，但这种影响力正在减弱。
Abstract This article studies the effect of labour unions on policy‐making in six different parts of the welfare state (passive and active labour market policy, employment protection, old‐age pensions, health care and education) in OECD countries after 1980 with a two‐level strategy: At the micro‐level, we investigate union members’ preferences. Ordered logit regression analyses indicate that union members favour generous social policies more strongly than non‐members. Moreover, this effect is stronger for programmes closely related to the labour market than for programmes without a strong labour market link. At the macro‐level, we investigate the conditional effect of unions on left parties expecting the former to push the left towards more generous labour market‐related (but not towards less‐labour market‐related) programmes. Regression analyses essentially provide evidence for such a relationship. Overall, unions have been powerful in promoting their members’ social policy preferences via left parties in government but their power is recently vanishing.