Striking concessions from governments: The success of general strikes in Western Europe, 1980-2009

Comparative Politics

Volumn 46, Issue 1, 2013, Pages 23-41

  Hamann, Kerstin ^a   Johnston, Alison ^b   Kelly, John ^c  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL FLORIDA   (United States)

^b OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^c UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84886608406     PISSN: 00104159     EISSN: 21516227     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5129/001041513807709356     Document Type: Article

References (51)

1. While our database of general strikes runs until December 2012, data on most of our independent variables are only available up to December 2009. Therefore, we only report data until 2009. Note that between 2010 and 2012, thirty-six additional strikes were staged in these sixteen countries, confirming the continuation of the existing strike pattern.
2. Paul Pierson, "The New Politics of the Welfare State," World Politics, 48 (January 1996), 143-79.
3. See, for example, Kenneth Walsh, Strikes in Europe and the United States (London: Pinter, 1983).
4. th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1989), 17.
5. Sjaak van Der Velden, Heiner Dribbusch, Dave Lyddon, and Kurt Vandaele, eds., Strikes around the World, 1968-2005: Case-Studies of 15 Countries (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2007).
6. Sometimes the mere threat of strike action can induce a response from government. Therefore, we also look at general strike threats. To count as a "threat," a trade union or union confederation had to declare its intention to call a general strike on a particular issue and on a given date. A total of thirteen credible general strike threats were issued but called off in response to revised government proposals (see Table 1).
7. th ed. (The Hague: Kluwer, 2007), 633-87
8. Franz Traxler, "The State in Industrial Relations: A Cross-National Analysis of Developments and Socio-economic Effects," European Journal of Political Research, 36 (January 1999), 55-85.
9. The total number of issues exceeds the number of strikes and strike threats because several strikes addressed multiple issues.
10. Andrew Glyn, Capitalism Unleashed: Finance, Globalization, and Welfare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
11. For example, Kerstin Hamann, Alison Johnston, and John Kelly, "Unions against Governments: General Strikes in Western Europe, 1980-2006," Comparative Political Studies (September 2013), 1030-57
12. Johannes Lindvall, "The Political Foundations of Trust and Distrust: Reforms and Protests in France," West European Politics, 34 (March 2011), 296-316
13. Taehyun Nam, "Rough Days in Democracies: Comparing Protests in Democracies," European Journal of Political Research, 46 (January 2007), 97-120.
14. Roberto Franzosi, The Puzzle of Strikes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
15. David Metcalf, Jonathan Wadsworth, and Peter Ingram, "Do Strikes Pay?" in David Metcalf and Simon Milner, eds., New Perspectives on Industrial Disputes (London: Routledge, 1993); Van Der Velden et al.
16. Hamann, Johnston, and Kelly.
17. Giuliano Bonoli and Martin Powell, eds., Social Democratic Party Policies in Contemporary Europe (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004)
18. James Piazza, "De-Linking Labour: Labour Unions and Social Democratic Parties under Globalization," Party Politics, 7 (July 2001), 413-35.
19. For example, Christopher J. Anderson, "Economic Voting and Political Context: A Comparative Perspective," Electoral Studies, 19 (June 2000), 151-70
20. Stephen D. Fisher and Sara B. Hobolt, "Coalition Government and Electoral Accountability," Electoral Studies, (September 2010), 358-69
21. G. Bingham Powell and Guy D. Whitten, "A Cross-National Analysis of Economic Voting: Taking Account of the Political Context," American Journal of Political Science, 37 (May 1993), 391-414.
22. See Nouriel Roubini and Jeffrey Sachs, "Government Spending and Budget Deficits in the Industrial Countries," Economic Policy, 4 (April 1989), 99-132, on budget balancing.
23. Markku Harrinvirta and Mikko Mattila, "The Hard Business of Balancing Budgets: A Study of Public Finances in Seventeen OECD Countries," British Journal of Political Science, 31 (July 2001), 497-521.
24. Bernd Ebbinghaus and Jelle Visser, eds., Trade Unions in Western Europe since 1945 (London: Macmillan, 2000).
25. Kerstin Hamann and John Kelly, "Varieties of Capitalism and Industrial Relations," in Paul Blyton, Ed Heery, Nick Bacon, and Jack Fiorito, eds., The SAGE Handbook of Industrial Relations (London: Sage, 2008), 129-49.
26. Samuel Cohn, When Strikes Make Sense - and Why: Lessons from Third Republic French Coal Miners (New York: Plenum Press, 1993).
27. While it would have been interesting to also collect data on the extent or intensity of general strikes (for example, percent of workforce participating), reliable data of this kind for all cases in our database are not available.
28. Hamann, Johnston, and Kelly.
29. Sabina Avdagic, Martin Rhodes, and Jelle Visser, eds, Social Pacts in Europe: Emergence, Evolution, and Institutionalization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)
30. Kerstin Hamann and John Kelly, Parties, Elections, and Policy Reforms in Western Europe: Voting for Social Pacts (London: Routledge, 2011).
31. Two additional strikes took place in Italy (March 21, 2003) and Spain (April 10, 2003) to protest against the war in Iraq. Since these were the only two strikes that were not directly related to domestic economic, labor, and welfare reforms, we dropped them from the analysis.
32. J. Richard Landis, and Gary G. Koch, "The Measurement of Observer Agreement for Categorical Data," Biometrics, 33 (March 1977), 159-74, give values between 0.61 and 0.8 as substantial agreement. We also calculated an alternative measure of intercoder reliability, Scott's pi, which was .754. These are acceptable levels of reliability especially since both Cohen's kappa and Scott's pi are conservative indices.
33. See Matthew Lombard, Jennifer Snyder-Duch, and Cheryl Campanella Bracken, "Practical Resources for Assessing and Reporting Intercoder Reliability in Content Analysis Research Projects," http://www.slis.indiana.edu/faculty/ hrosenba/www/Research/methods/lombard-reliability.pdf.
34. Duane Swank, "Comparative Parties Data Set," http://www.marquette.edu/polisci/faculty-swank.shtml
35. Klaus Armingeon, David Weisstanner, Sarah Engler, Panjotis Potolidis, Marlène Gerber, and Philipp Leimgruber, Comparative Political Dataset, 1960-2009, Institute of Political Science, University of Bern, www.ipw.unibe.ch/content/team/klaus-armingeon/comparative-political-data-sets/ index-ger.html.
36. Ian Budge, Hans-Dieter Klingemann, Andrea Volkens, Judith Bara, and Eric Tanenbaum, Mapping Policy Preferences: Estimates for Parties, Electors, and Governments 1945-1998 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)
37. Hans-Dieter Klingemann, Andrea Volkens, Judith Bara, and Ian Budge, Mapping Policy Preferences 11: Estimates for Parties, Electors, and Governments in Eastern Europe, European Union and OECD 1990-2003 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
38. OECD, "Online OECD Employment Database, Trade Union Density in OECD Countries, 1960-2008," http://www.oecd.org/document/34/0,3343,en-2649- 33927-40917154-1-1-1-1,00.html#union.
39. Alan Siaroff, "Corporatism in 24 Industrial Democracies: Meaning and Measurement," European Journal of Political Research, 36 (Octrober 1999), 175-205. We checked the robustness of our results by substituting measures of bargaining centralization and bargaining coordination based on data from Visser's 2011 ICTWSS database. Bargaining coordination and centralization serve as more specific proxies of union organization in the wage setting realm only while Siaroff's measure serves as a proxy of union involvement in the management of the economy and policy making). None of the measures returned statistically significant results.
40. Armingeon et al.
41. Data used in Hamann and Kelly, 2011, and available from the authors on request.
42. Given the lack of robustness of this variable, we do not present these results here, but they are available upon request.
43. Within these supplementary regressions, all controls and independent variables were dropped except the time trend and the strike issue dummies, in order to preserve degrees of freedom. We selected 40 percent as the empirical benchmark as this delivered a sample size above twenty.
44. The meaning of union unity varies between countries. In France, Italy, Portugal, and Spain union confederations are divided primarily on political lines, although Italy also includes a confessional cleavage; in Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands they are divided along confessional lines that also overlap with a political cleavage; in Greece, Finland, and Norway they are divided along sectoral and occupational lines.
45. Emmanuel Gerard and Steven van Hecke, "European Christian Democracy in the 1990s: Towards a Comparative Approach," in Steven Van Hecke and Emmanuel Gerard, eds., Christian Democratic Parties in Europe since the End of the Cold War, (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2004), 297-318.
46. See, for example, Bonoli and Powell; Piazza.
47. Kees van Kersbergen, "Contemporary Christian Democracy and the Demise of the Politics of Mediation," in Herbert Kitschelt, Peter Lange, Gary Marks, and John D. Stephens, eds., Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 346-70 and 365
48. see, also, Paolo Alberti and Robert Leonardi, "The Consociational Construction of Christian Democracy," in van Hecke and Gerard, 21-41.
49. nd ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 151-52
50. Bernd Ebbinghaus and Jelle Visser; Gary Tunsch, "Luxembourg: A Small Success Story," in Anthony Ferner and Richard Hyman, eds., Changing Industrial Relations in Europe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 349-50. Austria has a unitary trade union confederation, the OGB; Finland has three union confederations, SAK, STTK, and Akava, divided along occupational lines (Ebbinghaus and Visser).
51. Notably, some initial data confirm that centrist governments are particularly keen on working out contentious reforms with unions. In our database, centrist governments consulted with unions on 69 percent of reforms prior to general strikes, in contrast to the social democratic and conservative governments, which consulted only in 53 percent and 55 percent of cases, respectively. However, these results are tentative and are to be interpreted with caution due to the large number of cases (twentythree) for which we have no information on preceding consultations between government and unions.