Doctoral Dissertation Research: State-level factors and passage of Right-to-Work laws

Brown University, Providence RI

Investigators

Abstract

As of 2015, twenty-five states have passed Right-to-Work (RTW) laws prohibiting union security agreements and governing collective bargaining rights. Existing literature expects that states with relatively high levels of unionization and economic development will arrive at the same policy outcome, rejecting RTW proposals. These factors do not explain divergent RTW outcomes in states with similar economies such as those of the Industrial Midwest. In both the 1950s and 2010s, highly-unionized, industrial Midwestern states like Indiana, Michigan and Ohio faced legislative and referendum proposals for RTW. Despite similar conditions, these states arrived at different policy outcomes. Indiana passed RTW in 1957 and 2012; Ohio voted against it in 1958 and 2011, and Michigan failed to introduce RTW in the 1950s, but passed it in a surprising victory in 2012. These cases challenge expectations from existing literature and pose the following question: why have Indiana, Michigan and Ohio followed divergent paths through right-to-work, despite sharing similar political and socioeconomic profiles? That is the question this research seeks to answer. Answering these questions will contribute to the sociology of labor and understanding organizational processes and state practices that shape policy outcomes, a topic of concern for policy practitioners, academics and the public alike. Further, the research will result in a data repository that will be a rich resource for future scholars of these topics. Given that the interest groups who won Right-to-Work (RTW) contests in Indiana, Michigan and Ohio formed strategic partnerships with state parties, this project hypothesizes that these party coalitions explain divergent RTW outcomes across the three cases. Drawing from recent work in political science, the sociology of political parties, and the sociology of knowledge and expertise, this project proposes that party coalitions shaped RTW outcomes by building broad bases of organizational support, deploying campaign language that targeted multiple, disparate constituencies, and establishing the cognitive frameworks appropriate for evaluating RTW. This project tests these hypotheses through a comparative-historical analysis of RTW battles in Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio in the 1950s and 2010s. In so doing, this dissertation promises to make three important contributions. First, it will contribute to the RTW literature by providing explanation for otherwise anomalous cases. Second, it will contribute to the sociology of parties by specifying the mechanisms through parties shape policy outcomes. Third, it will facilitate future research by preserving all original source materials in a digital repository, creating a storehouse of information from which researchers, policy practitioners and the public may learn about RTW, the labor movement, and political parties in the United States. In these ways, this dissertation promises to deepen our understanding of the organizational processes and state practices that shape policy options and outcomes in the public sphere, a topic of concern for policy practitioners, academics and the public alike.