The Paradox of American Unionism: Why Americans Like Unions More Than Canadians Do But Join Much Less (review)

Union density, the proportion of union members among employees within a country, has been a central focus in scholarly efforts to understand the historical and cross-national variability of labor movement strength, and its interrelationship with public policy-making. So vital has the study of union density been to the fields of political economy and comparative politics, that the basic contours of trade union growth and decline during the past century are by now well-established. In the decades after World War II, spurred by changing levels of unemployment and such institutional developments as the establishment of centralized wage setting, trade union organizations flourished in nearly all capitalist democracies, yielding by 1980 an average density of over 50 percent. But much like social policy, union density varies considerably across national borders and world regions, ranging during the 1990s from an average approaching 90 percent within Scandinavia to 23 percent in Switzerland, and as low as 14 percent in the United States. Indeed, the persistence of high levels of union density within Nordic Europe (and also Belgium) attests to the strength of labor movement organizations within polities where centralized wage setting remains firmly established. Elsewhere, however, the postwar pattern of union growth has given way in many cases to substantial decline, particularly within liberal democracies such as the U.K. and the U.S. (and in several continental European democracies such as Austria and the Netherlands).

Given, then, the varieties of capitalism with respect to union density, the publication of Lipset and Meltz's The Paradox of American Unionism provides a further and finer-grained perspective on the North American context. Investigating union growth and decline within Canada versus the United States, Lipset and Meltz seek to develop a new theoretical explanation for the comparatively stronger position of Canadian unions during the current historical period. Whereas union density in Canada has varied about a mean of roughly 30 percent since the 1960s, American union density has experienced a steady decline from a postwar high of approximately 35 percent to a current low of 14 percent.

What explains the decline of American unions during the contemporary historical era? Lipset and Meltz revisit some well-established mechanisms, including labor law and the activities of national government, but their primary focus is on political-cultural factors. Summarizing results from their 1996 survey, Lipset and Meltz argue that egalitarian values and support for public provision are considerably more established within Canada in comparison to the United States, contributing to higher levels of union density. They also present some evidence that non-unionized Americans express slightly higher levels of preference for joining a union in comparison to their Canadian counterparts, but it is the broader pattern of cross-national differences in levels of public support for government regulation and provision that Lipset and Meltz identify as critical to understanding Canadian union strength.

Given the focus of past research on political institutions, partisan governance, and macroeconomic factors, a theoretical approach to union density emphasizing mass opinion or cultural factors raises intriguing and unresolved issues. One of the most pressing questions concerns Lipset and Meltz's explicit characterization of "values" as quite static, even largely unchanging over the course of the past century. Yet this view rests uneasily with the thrust of contemporary theory and research on mass opinion and its linkages to policy outcomes. Here, mass opinion is conceptualized as the aggregation of policy attitudes among individuals, and thereby subject to a variety of causal influences across countries and over time that exert some significant (if, at times, cross-cutting) pressures toward change. Among key mechanisms are life-course dynamics, individuals' degree of participation in major institutions, and their proximity to the discursive environment provided by social networks and movement organizations. While the net influence of such factors on opinion formation may yield a...