A Preface to Economic Democracy

Dahl, Robert A.

doi:10.1525/9780520341166

Cited by 477 publications

(151 citation statements)

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“…They have had significantly larger membership bases than other civic and political organizations, at one point reaching a third of the American workforce and still representing more than 10% today, accounting for more than 14 million workers. Unions are centered around work, where individuals spend most of their time outside of home life; they are also, in an important sense, micro‐democracies, places where workers participate in the establishment of representatives who help govern their workplace, negotiating everything from hours and wages and retirement benefits to political rights while on the job to standards of care and community (Dahl 1986). Prior research has found that unions have a large impact on the political attitudes of their workers, particularly in areas such as support for the welfare state and job protections (Francia and Bigelow 2010; Hasenfeld and Rafferty 1989) and trade (Ahlquist, Clayton, and Levi 2014; Kim and Margalit 2017), as well as muting the impact of far right organizations on worker preferences (Arndt and Rennwald 2016).…”

Section: How Unions Shape Racial Attitudesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Labor Unions and White Racial Politics

Frymer

Grumbach

2020

American J Political Sci

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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.

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Section: How Unions Shape Racial Attitudesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Labor Unions and White Racial Politics

Frymer

Grumbach

2020

American J Political Sci

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“…Unfortunately, Dahl does not fully develop these intuitions, and he even obscures them. Accepting the conventional view that shareholders “own” the corporation (Dahl 1985, 79), yet persuaded that the modern business firm is an association that ought to be organized along democratic lines, Dahl looks to alternative ownership arrangements that he believes are more compatible with worker self-government—employee ownership through single shares, collective employee ownership, state ownership, and ownership by “society” (Dahl 1985, 140–48). As Dahl puts it, “What is a desirable form of ownership ought to be viewed, at least in part, as subordinate to and dependent on a judgment as to what is a desirable form of control” (Dahl 1977, 16).…”

Section: The Governmental Provenance Of Corporate Authoritymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For one thing, empowering workers, who have a much sharper interest than shareholders in a company's long-term solvency, counters the problems of risk seeking and short-termism that plague the present-day shareholder corporation (Greenfield 2006, 57). Worker participation also likely brings broader political and societal benefits (Dahl 1985, 93–110; McDonnell 2008, 357–73; Pateman 1975, chap. 3).…”

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confidence: 99%

Beyond Public and Private: Toward a Political Theory of the Corporation

2013

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This article challenges the liberal, contractual theory of the corporation and argues for replacing it with a political theory of the corporation. Corporations are government-like in their powers, and government grants them both their external “personhood” and their internal governing authority. They are thus not simply private. Yet they are privately organized and financed and therefore not simply public. Corporations transgress all the basic dichotomies that structure liberal treatments of law, economics, and politics: public/private, government/market, privilege/equality, and status/contract. They are “franchise governments” that cannot be satisfactorily assimilated to liberalism. The liberal effort to assimilate them, treating them as contractually constituted associations of private property owners, endows them with rights they ought not have, exacerbates their irresponsibility, and compromises their principal public benefit of generating long-term growth. Instead, corporations need to be placed in a distinct category—neither public nor private, but “corporate”—to be regulated by distinct rules and norms.

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“…86Dahl 1985, 111; see also Dahl 1977. I thank Alex Hertel-Fernandez for drawing my attention to these two works.…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The American Precariat: U.S. Capitalism in Comparative Perspective

Thelen¹

2019

Perspect. polit.

105

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The address situates the rise of “gig” work in the context of a much longer-term trend toward more precarious forms of employment. It explores the forces that are driving these developments and discusses the problems they pose at both the individual level and the national level. By situating the United States in a comparative perspective, it identifies the structural factors that exacerbate the problem of precarity and intensify its effects in the American political economy.

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A Preface to Economic Democracy

Cited by 477 publications

References 0 publications

Labor Unions and White Racial Politics

Labor Unions and White Racial Politics

Beyond Public and Private: Toward a Political Theory of the Corporation

The American Precariat: U.S. Capitalism in Comparative Perspective

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