Labor Unions and White Racial Politics

Scholars and political observers point to declining labor unions, on the one hand, and rising white identity politics, on the other, as profound changes in American politics. However, there has been little attention given to the potential feedback between these forces. In this article, we investigate the role of union membership in shaping white racial attitudes. We draw upon research in history and American political development to generate a theory of interracial labor politics, in which union membership reduces racial resentment. Cross-sectional analyses consistently show that white union members have lower racial resentment and greater support for policies that benefit African Americans. More importantly, our panel analysis suggests that gaining union membership between 2010 and 2016 reduced racial resentment among white workers. The findings highlight the important role of labor unions in mass politics and, more broadly, the importance of organizational membership for political attitudes and behavior. Verification Materials: The data and materials required to verify the computational reproducibility of the results, procedures, and analyses in this article are available on the American Journal of Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId = https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/VJUOOV. Since the election of Barack Obama, political scientists have begun to reinvestigate the politics of white racial identity (see, e.g., Abrajano and Hajnal 2017; Jardina 2019; Parker and Barreto 2013; Tesler 2012, 2016). This work, sometimes intersected with the politics of gender and class, attempts to explain why a significant number of white working-class men and women voted against President Obama in 2008 and 2012, and for President Donald Trump in 2016. Largely ignored in this debate is the role of an additional contextual variable, labor union membership, and how it potentially shapes the attitudes and behavior of the white working class. It is worth further examination. In the last three presidential elections, for instance, white union members provided a majority of their votes to the Democratic Party candidate, whereas the majorities of whites who did not belong to unions voted for the Republican candidate. Moreover, although in decline over the past several decades, labor unions remain a chief mobilizing institution of white workers with Paul Frymer is Professor, Department of Politics, Princeton University, 1 Fisher Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544 (pfrymer@princeton.edu). Jacob M. Grumbach is Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Washington, 101 Gowen Hall, Box 353530, Seattle, WA 98195-3530 (grumbach@uw.edu). The authors are listed in alphabetical order. We thank Aaron Eckhouse, Alex Hertel-Fernandez, Kevon Looney, Jake Rosenfeld, Sarah Staszak, Dorian Warren, and our anonymous reviewers. We also thank the Bridges Center for Labor Studies at the University of Washington for helpful assistance. considerable influence over their voting behavior and attitudes toward public policy (Leighley and Nagler 2007; Rosenfeld 2014; Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1995). In this article, we investigate the relationship between union membership and the racial politics of white Americans. We develop a theory of labor unions and racial attitudes that predicts union membership reduces racial resentment toward African Americans.1 Union leaders, because of the need to recruit workers of color in order to achieve majority memberships in racially diversifying labor sectors, have ideological and strategic incentives to mitigate racial resentment among the rank and file in pursuit of organizational maintenance and growth (Rosenfeld and Kleykamp 2009). Because of historic institutional ties to the Democratic Party, union leaders also have incentives to encourage support for the party, an organization of its own right that ought to have strategic and ideological incentives to promote interracial coalition building (Ahlquist 2017; Dark 1999; Hajnal and Lee 2011; Although we do not test it empirically, this theory may extend to racial resentment toward nonwhite immigrant groups. American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 00, No. 0, xxxx 2020, Pp. 1–16 C ©2020, Midwest Political Science Association DOI: 10.1111/ajps.12537