Abstract
Scholars have long conceptualized unions and left parties as powerful and independent social actors within national systems of the political economy. Yet a unique survey of more than 2300 German Social Democratic Party (SPD) activists provides new insights into the relationship of two, in fact, deeply intertwined organizations. Factor analysis followed by multivariate regression of the survey results reveal two distinct dimensions of alienation that occur among party activists as they evaluate trade unions. ‘Content alienation’ picks up on differences in political goals among unions and the SPD. Meanwhile, ‘contact alienation’ builds on scepticism about union inclination or capacity. Novel data establish the magnitude and distribution of these two forms of alienation as measured by individual-level attitudes, which, in turn, have implications for debates on comparative political economy, political parties and corporatism. They suggest also sources of resilience and stability in German capitalism, notwithstanding important levels of alienation inside the party over trade union goals and methods.
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Notes
Similarly, from the perspective of union leaders, the birth of new parties on the left, such as the Greens and Die Linke, creates new options to choose from and thus makes de-alignment from the SPD less costly.
Moreover, the meltdown of the Green Party from over 20 per cent approval in summer 2013 to 8.5 per cent certainly added to what would otherwise have been a more desultory result.
See EIRO-online; http://www.eurofound.europa.eu/eiro/2003/02/inbrief/de0302104n.htm
We thank an anonymous reviewer for this point.
sozialtechnokratische Modellbastelei ohne politische Erdung.
The software did allow for interrupting the survey and completing it later.
Because of German privacy law, the party could not transfer its email list to researchers but could only facilitate the research by forwarding the survey. This led to some minor complications. For example, the survey was limited to one follow-up reminder, where two is considered preferable without overburdening recipients (Hall et al, 2009, p. 511).
We excluded responses where individuals did not answer more than the first five out of 48 questions.
Historically, union membership in Germany went up as workers aged, before falling again as they neared retirement after age 60. Thus, some of our younger respondents might be expected to join unions at a later date. However, Schnabel and Wagner (2005) found that in Germany age was positively correlated with union membership until about 1992, after which this relationship seems to have disappeared (p. 19). That may imply that our very low numbers in the youngest cohort reflect a shift in which young party members are less likely to join unions later.
As far as unions’ stance on welfare state reform, respondents who consider unions an obstacle could theoretically come from two different camps: critics from the left, who feel unions inhibit moves towards a more generous welfare state, and critics from the right, who feel that unions are a barrier to putatively necessary welfare state retrenchment. While we cannot rule out such a multidirectional interpretation of this interview item, we consider it unlikely. At the time of our survey, there was not a popular counter model of welfare state reform from the left. The public discourse on welfare state issues closely associated welfare reform with retrenchment and not with expansion. We thank an anonymous reviewer for making us aware of this alternative interpretation.
Our data have two other limitations. First, while we measure the alienation of any given sub-group of SPD members against a reference group, we do not have left-right measures of the sign of this alienation. One sub-group could be alienated to the right of the unions while a second sub-group might be alienated to the left. In other work (Behrens and Jacoby, 2014), we take up this issue with a comparison of SPD respondents in the public sector – a group often held to be to the right of union leadership – in comparison to other groups such as the 1968ers. One implication of that work is that even high levels of alienation might be organizationally stable, as they pull in different directions. Second, and for similar reasons, it is possible that a given sub-group might contain polarized views about unions – on either contact or content dimensions – that cancel each other out and register as a position close to that of the union. The concern is that we might underestimate the amount of alienation. Our response is that we do have good measures of total alienation (47 per cent), which do not suggest that the movement is teeming with ‘extra’ alienation that we are not picking up on in the sub-groups.
We used principle component analysis with varimax rotation.
To the extent classical theories of corporatism look at these questions, this seems to be the implicit view of how union members navigate their dual loyalties.
AfA: Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Arbeitnehmerfragen; AGS: Arbeitsgemeinschaft Selbständige.
We thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.
Clearly, our analysis also found many areas in which party activists see unions in positive terms as well.
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Jacoby, W., Behrens, M. ‘Breaking up is hard to do’: German trade unions within the Social Democratic Party. Comp Eur Polit 14, 273–297 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/cep.2014.29
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/cep.2014.29