These mismatches were further highlighted when the Electoral Reform Society simulated the results if the UK followed the proportional representation electoral rules used elsewhere in Europe. It found that the Conservatives would have won 288 instead of 365 seats, Labour 216 instead of 202, and the Social Democrats 70 instead of 11 (though the Church of Militant Elvis party still would not won any seats). Under these proportional representation election rules, the composition of seats in Parliament would be strongly representative of the nature of the votes cast (e.g., Conservatives with 44.3 percent of the seats based on 43.6 percent of the votes).
This is not a matter purely for the political sphere. Ryan Lamare and I have been working on a research project that analyzes the connection between election rules (representativeness) and industrial relations—specifically, linkages to the extent of workplace employee representation such as labor unions and union membership. Theoretically, we identify multiple ways in which political representativeness might shape employee representation, including enacting public policies, involving unions in peak-level corporatist initiatives, enabling direct relationships between trade unions and legislators, shaping attitudes around political inclusion that affect workplace agency, and giving social legitimacy to collective voice. Through all of these channels, a political system with greater representativeness is expected to have stronger workplace employee representation and higher rates of union membership.
But what happens in practice? Political scientists have developed measures of legislative representativeness, and we focus on a measure called “disproportionality.” In short, this measures the magnitude of the deviations between seat and vote shares. With a baseline of perfect proportionality (seat share = vote share) of zero, then greater deviations yield a higher disproportionality score. The disproportionality score for last week’s UK election is 11.9—this is actually lower than in recent UK elections but is much higher than in many European countries (for example, the disproportionality score is typically less than five in Belgium, and less than two in Denmark). France is another European country with high disproportionality scores—for example, President Macron’s party has more than 50 percent of the seats in the French National Assembly even though it only received 28 percent of the votes (maybe this is connected to all of the worker protests in France?). [Curious about other country's values? Choose any election here and look for “Disp” in the lower right corner.]
We can then statistically analyze the predictive power of disproportionality scores across European countries between 2002 and 2016. We generally find that disproportionality is negatively related to the presence of trade unions and other representative bodies in the workplace, the existence of a collective wage agreement, and the likelihood of individual union membership. In other words, consistent with the predictions of our theory above, greater representativeness in a country’s legislative body is linked to greater workplace representativeness. We can’t observe exactly why, but we think that it’s because a culture of compromise and inclusion at a legislative level spills into other spheres, including the workplace.
In fact, our results suggest that what happens at the electoral level is quite important for industrial relations. Returning to the recent UK election, using the distribution of hypothetical seats that the Electoral Reform Society calculated would have resulted using proportional representation electoral rules, we calculate that the disproportionality score would have been only 1.4 instead of the actual 11.9. This is a very low score indicative of a highly representative outcome. Using a back of the envelope calculation, then, our statistical results imply that this reduction in disproportionality (using the proportional representation election rules) would increase the chances of individual union membership in the range of 2 to 9 percentage points. Note that the union membership rate (“union density”) in the UK is less than 25 percent, so this hypothetical change is not trivial. Those interested in the world of work and employee representation should pay more attention to election rules.
Source: John W. Budd and J. Ryan Lamare (forthcoming) "The Importance of Political Systems for Trade Union Membership, Coverage, and Influence: Theory and Comparative Evidence," British Journal of Industrial Relations. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12575. [free access to the pre-publication version here]
No comments:
Post a Comment