Right to Work or Right to Vote? Labor Policy and American Democracy

There is growing attention to the role of organized labor in maintaining and expanding democratic institutions in the United States. In this article, we investigate the effect of right-to-work laws on electoral democracy in the states. We theorize a series of mechanisms by which labor unions contribute to the maintenance and expansion of democratic institutions, including contributing money to campaigns and influencing the electorate. Right-to-work laws, by limiting labor unions' ability to raise funds, reduce the strength of these mechanisms and send signals to political elites about the organizational balance of power in their states. Using recent advances in difference-in-differences analysis, we find that right-to-work laws had a substantial negative effect on state-level electoral democracy in recent decades, even net of Republican control of government. Although the difficulty of causal identification in this context warrants caution, the findings speak to the importance of organized labor in shaping democratic institutions.