Frustrated Demand for Unionisation: the Case of the United States and Canada Revisited

In this paper we demonstrate that there is a substantial union representation gap in the United States. We arrive at this conclusion by comparing Canadian and American worker responses to questions relating to desired union representation. We find that a majority of the gap in union density between Canada and the US is a function of greater frustrated demand on the part of American workers. We then estimate potential union density rates for the United States and Canada and find that, given current levels of union membership in both countries, if effective demand for unionisation among non-union workers were realised, then this would imply equivalently higher rates of unionisation (37 and 36 percent in the US and Canada respectively). These results cast some doubt on the view that even minor reforms to labour legislation in the US, to bring them in line with those in most Canadian jurisdictions, would do nothing to improve the rate of organising success in the United States. The results also have implications for countries such as Britain who have recently moved closer to a Wagner-Act model of statutory recognition.Frustrated Demand for Unionisation: the Case of the United States and Canada Revisited

The Separation of People and State

The subject of American exceptionalism, about which much has been written, is extremely complex. There is no simple way to describe all the ways in which America differs from the other nations of the world. The United States Constitution is a central part of the creed that defines, creates, and preserves American exceptionalism. The American vision of constitutionalism includes at least four distinctive elements: the belief in adherence to a founding document: a written Constitution; the belief in constitutionally limited government; the legal enforcement of these limits by an independent judiciary, and the invocation of these limits by the Congress, the Executive, state governments, and the People themselves; and the anti‐democratic nature of the Constitution’s republican form of government. Each of these elements has come under challenge by American constitutional law professors, at least some of whom prefer the European model of constitutionalism to the American one. To the extent that these elements are eroded, America becomes less exceptional, which is a welcomed development among some of those same legal academics. The separation of People and State is preserved by the Constitution because no one can claim to speak for the People: neither the President (unlike various dictatorships) nor the Congress (unlike the parliamentary systems that dominate throughout the rest of the world). This separation, like the separation of Church and State, provides the space for the rest of the American ideology of classical liberalism to survive. In contrast, the rest of the world’s democratic regimes, whether or not they have written constitutions, are far more susceptible to capture by interests and also by the ideological fashions of the day. In the author\u27s view, the separation of People and State has served America well

Class Is Not Dead! It Has Been Buried Alive

By means of a reanalysis of the most relevant data source—the International Social Mobility and Politics File—this article criticizes the newly grown consensus in political sociology that class voting has declined since World War II. An increase in crosscutting cultural voting, rooted in educational differences rather than a decline in class voting, proves responsible for the decline of traditional class-party alignments. Moreover, income differences have not become less but more consequential for voting behavior during this period. It is concluded that the new consensus has been built on quicksand. Class is not dead—it has been buried alive under the increasing weight of cultural voting, systematically misinterpreted as a decline in class voting because of the widespread application of the so-called Alford index

Vergleichende Analysen der Landtagswahlen von 1990 bis 2009 in den deutschen Bundesländern Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Sachsen, Sachsen-Anhalt und Thüringen

Die Demokratisierung in den Ländern Osteuropas ist mit jenen davor nicht zu vergleichen, da die ehemals kommunistischen Länder vor dem sogenannten Dilemma der Gleichzeitigkeit, einer gleichzeitigen Transformation des politischen und des ökonomischen Systems, standen. Innerhalb der ehemals sozialistisch regierten Länder stellen wiederum die fünf bis zum Jahr 1990 zur DDR gehörenden Bundesländer aufgrund der Wiedervereinigung und dem damit einhergehenden gesellschaftlichen Wandel eine Ausnahme dar. Ausgehend von der Cleavage Theorie von Seymour Martin Lipset und Stein Rokkan und anhand einer Analyse von Wahl- und Umfrageergebnissen der Landtagswahlen in Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Sachsen, Sachsen-Anhalt und Thüringen im Zeitraum von 1990 bis 2009, soll untersucht werden, inwieweit sich Parteibindungen bestimmte sozialer Gruppen entwickelt haben