Assignment I - 1

In our first assignment, we’re required to pick a data source that we’ll use in our upcoming assignments and think about the kind of analyses we’d like to do with it.

I’m a researcher at a Dutch trade union and I’m also interested in the broader social role of unions. I know that there’s quite some evidence that union members are more likely to turn out to vote in elections than non-members, at least so in the US, but I’m interested whether union membership is also related to other forms of political participation.

The Outlook on Life Surveys contain variables on activities like contacting a public offical or attending a protest meeting. They also contain variables on membership in organisations and social movements such as Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party. They do not contain information on whether the respondents themselves are union members, but they do contain a question whether anyone in the respondent’s household is currently a union member. While it may turn out to be problematic for my purposes that there’s no information on union membership of the respondents themselves, I still think this looks like an interesting dataset and I decided to pick this one for my assignments.

Next, we’re required to find relevant literature using sources like Google Scholar. I used the search terms union membership participation and one of the publications I found is a study by Kerrissey and Schofer (2013) on union membership and political participation in the US. Kerrissey and Schofer find that union membership is associated with various measures of political participation including voting, participating in protests, joining voluntary associations, and donating money to political campaigns (controlling for a number of variables). The effect is larger for lower-educated persons - likely because they have fewer alternative sources of political capital.

All kinds of interesting questions arise: for example, does membership in other types of organisations and social movements have a similar association with political participation as union membership? And what is the role of the institutional context (c.f. Cebolla-Boado and Ortiz 2014)? But for now I’ll focus on a more straightforward question.

I plan to - sort of - replicate Kerrissey and Schofer’s study using a different dataset (the Outlook on Life Surveys) and a slightly different independent variable (union membership at the household level instead of the individual level). My hypothesis is that political participation (as measured by a number of variables) will be higher for respondents with a union member in their household.

References

Cebolla-Boado, Hector and Luis Ortiz (2014). Extra-representational types of political participation and models of trade unionism: a cross-country comparison. Socio-Economic Review (12:4), 747–778.
Kerissey, Jasmine and Evan Schofer (2013). Union Membership and Political Participation in the United States. Social Forces (91:3), 895–928.