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Global Competition, Local Unions, and Political Representation: Disentangling Mechanisms

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dc.contributor.authorBecher, Michael
dc.contributor.authorStegmueller, Daniel
dc.contributor.rorhttps://ror.org/02jjdwm75
dc.date.accessioned2025-01-16T13:11:56Z
dc.date.available2025-01-16T13:11:56Z
dc.date.issued2023-01
dc.description.abstractWhile recent scholarship has demonstrated multiple political effects of international trade, less attention has been paid to unbundling the mechanisms through which import competition affects democratic politics. One mechanism, in theory, works through labor unions as domestic countervailing powers shaping legislative responses on compensation and trade votes. We assess the relevance of unions as a mediating variable in the US Congress. For identification, we leverage two distinct sources of exogenous variation, one instrument for import exposure and another for unionization, and combine them in a semiparametric estimator. We find that (i) import competition lowers district-level unionization, (ii) weaker unions lead to less legislative support for compensating economic losers and less opposition to trade deregulation, and (iii) the union mechanism represents a large fraction of the overall effect of import exposure on legislative votes. The results help explain weak compensation and further trade liberalization in the face of rising global competition.
dc.description.peerreviewedno
dc.description.statusPublished
dc.formatapplication/pdf
dc.identifier.citationBecher, Michael and Stegmueller, Daniel, Global Competition, Local Unions, and Political Representation: Disentangling Mechanisms * (June 12, 2024). http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4565602
dc.identifier.doihttp://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4565602
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14417/3460
dc.language.isoen
dc.publisherSSRN
dc.relation.departmentComparative Politics
dc.relation.entityIE University
dc.relation.schoolIE School of Politics, Economics & Global Affairs
dc.rightsAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
dc.rights.accessRightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
dc.rights.urihttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/deed.en
dc.subject.keywordPolitical economy
dc.subject.keywordGlobalization
dc.subject.keywordUnions
dc.subject.keywordRepresentation
dc.subject.keywordCausal mediation
dc.subject.keywordEffect decomposition
dc.subject.keywordUS Congress
dc.titleGlobal Competition, Local Unions, and Political Representation: Disentangling Mechanisms
dc.typeinfo:eu-repo/semantics/workingPaper
dc.version.typeinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
dspace.entity.typePublication
relation.isAuthorOfPublication64459ea7-0faa-4600-9041-a4f317ab9579
relation.isAuthorOfPublication.latestForDiscovery64459ea7-0faa-4600-9041-a4f317ab9579
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