{"title":"State Union Density Effects on Workers' Support for Reducing Income Inequality, 1973-2016.","authors":"Shawn Perron","doi":"10.1177/23294965221089914","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Research often borrows on common yet somewhat unsubstantiated beliefs that unions influence inequality attitudes among unionized and nonunionized workers. This paper draws on inequality attitude data from the General Social Survey and state-level union data from the Current Population Survey and County Business Patterns between 1973 and 2016 to test this hypothesis. Linear probability, fixed-effects, and marginal structural models estimate that a large increase in state union density moderately increases workers' support for reducing income inequality by three to 12 percentage points. Findings lend some empirical support for the capacity of unions to influence redistributive policy and market attitudes.</p>","PeriodicalId":44139,"journal":{"name":"Social Currents","volume":"9 4","pages":"369-386"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8000,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9279886/pdf/","citationCount":"1","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Social Currents","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23294965221089914","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2022/5/26 0:00:00","PubModel":"Epub","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"SOCIOLOGY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 1
Abstract
Research often borrows on common yet somewhat unsubstantiated beliefs that unions influence inequality attitudes among unionized and nonunionized workers. This paper draws on inequality attitude data from the General Social Survey and state-level union data from the Current Population Survey and County Business Patterns between 1973 and 2016 to test this hypothesis. Linear probability, fixed-effects, and marginal structural models estimate that a large increase in state union density moderately increases workers' support for reducing income inequality by three to 12 percentage points. Findings lend some empirical support for the capacity of unions to influence redistributive policy and market attitudes.
期刊介绍:
Social Currents, the official journal of the Southern Sociological Society, is a broad-ranging social science journal that focuses on cutting-edge research from all methodological and theoretical orientations with implications for national and international sociological communities. The uniqueness of Social Currents lies in its format. The front end of every issue is devoted to short, theoretical, agenda-setting contributions and brief, empirical and policy-related pieces. The back end of every issue includes standard journal articles that cover topics within specific subfields of sociology, as well as across the social sciences more broadly.