Political Parties and Labour legislation in Canada and the U.S.

Abstract

This article shows that structural political and legal factors, better than cultural or economic ones, explain why Canada's workforce is twice as unionized as that of the United States. Its main argument demonstrates that Canada's legal environment is more pro‐union due to systematic national differences in party systems and constitutions—i.e., the presence of a social‐democratic party and a federalized and parliamentary constitution, versus the U.S.'s separation of powers, more nationalized polity, and absence of a social democratic party.