State Labor Laws and Government Responsiveness to Public Opinion

Abstract

We investigate the effects of states’ labor laws, which can enhance or diminish the political power of public and private sector labor unions, on government responsiveness to public opinion. Drawing on newly developed measures of public opinion and policy liberalism in the US states over time, we leverage differences in the timing of law enactments across the states and find that labor laws impact government responsiveness in distinct ways. States that adopt right-to-work laws that lessen private sector union influence enact economic policies that are more conservative than public opinion, whereas states that adopt mandatory collective bargaining laws for public sector employees enact economic policies that are more liberal than opinion. These findings are consistent across a variety of different model specifications, timeframes, and measurement techniques and have substantively important implications for understanding the impact of government policies on the power of organized interests and the dynamics of political representation in American democracy.