Abstract
Trade union membership in European Union member states has been in decline for decades, which has many concerned about the future of workers’ rights. While existing work examines the reasons for this decline, my research shifts the focus from union density to the functions unions serve and how these functions affect and are affected by changing electoral behavior. I examine the rise of right-wing populist movements in Europe and how these movements and the challenges today’s labor unions face can be traced to the same underlying forces. I argue that, as the relevance of trade unions declines for blue-collar workers, support for right-wing movements increases. I test this claim with the help of statistical analyses of European Values Study data. I find preliminary support for my hypothesis, and suggest how this can inform our responses to the rise of populism in Europe.
Highlights
In recent years, the rise of radical right-wing populist movements throughout the European Union has been observed by a wide variety of social scientists and journalists
While there are certain transformations of data and variations of models that could provide a better fit for our data, outlined below, the output we can observe suggests that decreasing confidence in labor unions increases the probability of selecting a higher value on the political identity scale
We could assume that similar coefficients and significance suggests the hypothetical “protectionist index” is a factor causing both trends and the basis of the existing relationship for which we found evidence
Summary
Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.claremont.edu/urceu Part of the Industrial Organization Commons, Labor and Employment Law Commons, Labor.
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