We explore the relationship between FDI, regime type, and strikes in low-and middle-income countries. We argue that FDI produces social tensions and opportunities for protest that can result in higher levels of industrial conflict. However, the effect of FDI is moderated by regime type. While democracies tend to have higher levels of protest overall, they are better able than authoritarian regimes to cope with the strains arising from FDI. We cite two reasons. First, political competition forces regimes to incorporate workers, which shifts conflict from industrial relations to the political arena. Second, democracies provide workers with freedom of association rights, which facilitate institutionalized grievance resolution. We test the argument using a new dataset of labor protest in low-and middle-income countries for the period 1980-2005.
The author uses item response theory to evaluate the increasingly prominent method of measuring labor rights developed by David Kucera. The analysis shows that most of the component items in the Kucera index relate to the same latent variable, which can be construed as “the propensity to violate labor rights.” At the same time, individual country scores highlight the method’s inability to distinguish between countries known to have excellent respect for worker rights and extremely repressive countries. The final section tests the robustness of Kucera’s finding that there is no relationship between observed labor rights violations and foreign direct investment.
The study draws on evidence from South Asia to explore how union partisan ties condition industrial protest in the context of rapid economic change. It argues that unions controlled by major political parties respond to the economic challenges of the postreform period by facilitating institutionalized grievance resolution and encouraging restraint in the collective bargaining arena. By contrast, politically independent unions and those controlled by small parties are more likely to ratchet up militancy and engage in extreme or violent forms of protest. The difference between the protest behavior of major party unions and other types of unions is explained by the fact that major political parties are encompassing organizations that internalize the externalities associated with the protest of their affiliated unions. Using original survey data from four regions in South Asia, the study shows that party encompassment is a better predictor of worker protest than other features of the affiliated party or the union, including whether the party is in or out of power, the ideological orientation of the party, or the degree of union encompassment. The analysis has implications for the policy debate over whether successful economic reform is contingent upon the political exclusion or repression of organized labor.
Does colonialism have long-term effects on political stability? This question is addressed in a study of India's Naxalite insurgency, a Maoist rebellion characterized by its left-wing proponents as having roots in the colonial period. The article highlights three mechanisms linking colonialism with contemporary Naxalite violence-land inequality, discriminatory policies toward low-caste and tribal groups, and upper-caste-dominated administrative institutions. It analyzes how the degree of British influence relates to Naxalite conflict in 589 districts from 1980 to 2011. A positive association is found between British influence and the strength of the Naxalite rebellion across all of India, within both the "Red Corridor" region and former princely states. The results are robust to a coarsened exact matching analysis and a wide array of robustness checks. The findings call into question whether the supposedly beneficial administrative and institutional legacies of colonialism can be evaluated without reference to their social costs.
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