Corporations and other powerful contemporary institutions take decisions that increasingly impact the possibilities for well-being not only of those who work or live within them and are governed by them but also of distant people who are deeply affected by their functioning. This democratic deficit raises the question of whether the workers and others who are so affected should have a say in the policies that set the basic conditions for their own livelihoods and flourishing. This chapter sketches an understanding of the scope of the All-Affected Principle, taking it as an important addition to the “common activities” principle that requires democratic rights for the members of an institution or community. It proposes that both principles require democratic management (or “workplace democracy”) within firms, and suggests that the All-Affected Principle is especially apt for addressing the exogenous effects of decisions on people beyond the firm, or on distant people impacted by the institutions of global governance. The chapter goes on to consider applications of the All-Affected Principle for other labor rights under capitalism, including the right to form unions, support for care work, and for the unemployed.

This chapter provides an overview of the literature on labor politics, social movements, and political parties, and locates the main argument in this literature. It operationalizes the two organizational traits, hierarchical relations and factionalism, to show how they produce three strategies. It concludes by laying out the research methods used to carry out the analysis and reach these conclusions.

This chapter analyzes the organizational prerequisites for the strategy of instrumentalism, by charting changes in the organizational structure of the National Educational Workers Union (SNTE) of Mexico in the 1980s and 1990s. It examines the threats to the corporatist model posed by the dissident movement and the regime response to help the union leadership regain control. President Carlos Salinas sheltered the union from the potentially disruptive effects of education decentralization policies and strengthened SNTE with policies to improve teacher pay. These concessions shaped the union’s internal organization, providing the resources Elba Esther Gordillo needed to build a dominant faction. The consolidation of power in the national union leadership was crucial for the strategy of instrumentalism.

This chapter considers insights from the argument that extend to a broader set of cases, given the global scope of teacher mobilization. It analyzes the shadow cases of teachers in Chile (leftism), Peru (movementism), and Indonesia (instrumentalism) to again demonstrate the crucial importance of union organizations. Finally, it considers avenues for future research on education policymaking, interest representation, and labor politics. A more comparative approach to the study of education is needed in political science to illuminate the different dynamics unfolding in public school systems in countries around the world.

This chapter analyzes the evolution of the Federation of Colombian Educators (FECODE) in the 1980s and 1990s, to show how and why factionalism took hold. It first examines the Pedagogical Movement of the 1980s, a teaching-oriented social movement that reveals a fundamental split between the radical and moderate lefts. This movement sheds light on why the union was initially included in policy negotiations. It then examines broader changes in teacher–state relations that culminated in FECODE’s role in negotiating an education decentralization package that strengthened the national executive committee. The last section analyzes how the political opening contributed to more hierarchical relations and deepening political divisions.

This chapter provides an overview of the book. It presents the outcome of interest: the political strategies of teachers or the different ways that teachers mobilize in politics. These strategies are referred to as instrumentalism (strategic alliances), movementism (recurrent protests), and leftism (alliances with left parties). The chapter explains the significance of these strategies in relation to the labor movement and education politics, and it introduces the main argument. This chapter shows that examining the ways in which teachers mobilize in politics helps to shed light on normative questions about how they shape education policy and democratic governance.

This chapter argues that the organizational structure of the Argentine teachers’ confederation (CTERA), with power rooted in provincial and municipal actors, is crucial for explaining why teachers engaged in ongoing protests. It examines the process of union rebuilding in the wake of democratization, after harsh repression during the military regime. Even if newly elected leaders offered little support to the union because of the debt crisis, union leaders made some progress in consolidating CTERA through their own initiatives. The chapter then turns to decentralization under President Carlos Menem as a point of inflection. This undermined national union leaders, weakening their hold on the base. Once organizational hierarchies were weakened, movementism became the union’s political strategy.

Chapter 5 turns to an examination of the ties between working-class representatives and constituents, by taking an in-depth look at the relationship between labor unions, political parties, and workers in Argentina and Mexico. We show that the evolution of unions and parties throughout history lead to working-class deputies in Argentina having stronger ties to workers and a better track record of policy representation than working-class deputies in Mexico. Then we leverage an original dataset of working-class representation over time and across states in Argentina and Mexico to show empirically that whereas increases in working-class representation in Argentina are associated with citizens evaluating their representative institutions more positively, the increased presence of working-class legislators in Mexico leads to backlash and more negative evaluations of legislatures and political parties.

This chapter shows how labor repression played a crucial role in the history of free trade in many democratic developing countries. While the regression analyses in the previous chapter show that my argument is robust to alternative explanations and generalizable across more than 100 developing countries, this chapter begins to fill in the missing pieces - the causal mechanisms - that link democracy, labor repression, and trade liberalization.

In the mid-1980s, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi attempted to lower India's tariffs and open the country's economy to global competition. Gandhi's trade policy proposals led India's protectionist labor unions to launch a series of general strikes that helped to block these reforms; Gandhi left office in 1989 with India's average tariff still above 80 percent. This chapter continues this story into the 1990s, when Prime Minister Narasimha Rao launched a new attempt at trade liberalization. By 1996, Rao managed to lower India’s average tariffs to 37 percent - a major success compared to Gandhi's efforts, but relatively gradual liberalization compared to many other democratic developing countries. This chapter draws on archival research to illustrate how Rao used labor repression to weaken union opposition to his economic reforms.

This chapter introduces the idea that developing countries with democratic governments repeatedly opened their economies while cracking down on labor unions.

Since the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the Soviet Bloc, temporary and part-time wage labor, and particularly the use of immigrant and contract labor, have become increasingly common in the lives of workers, the creation of value, and the distribution of wealth. These conditions have facilitated the emergence of multiple economic formations often referred to, in popular media and scholarly writing, as new “economies” such as the gig economy, the informal economy, the sharing economy, and the gift economy. These formations have served as subsidies to prevailing capitalist political economics and alternatives to engaging in wage labor, simultaneously complementing and competing with dominant economic formations. This chapter discusses the dynamic relations that workers of the 21st century have forged among multiple livelihoods and economic formations, considering, in particular, how they derive value from distinct yet complementary formations.

Civil society in the Arab region successfully mobilized dissent during the 2011 uprisings. In particular, youth and women movements, surprised many international and domestic audiences by leading massive peaceful protests against their authoritarian regimes. Despite their initial success, these movements failed to bring liberal reforms or facilitate democratic transitions and soon lost their momentum and popular support. Chapter 5 highlights how civil society in most parts of the Arab world was undermined and why it failed to play a more consequential role in constitution-making and democratization. It first examines why the characteristics of constitution-making process matter if civil society is to succeed in its democratizing role. The chapter also looks at both endogenous and exogenous factors impacting civil society’s failure that persist across the region. The endogenous factors hindering the work of most CSOs in the region include lack of organizational capacity as well as lack of public legitimacy. The two exogenous factors that contributed to civil society’s failure in playing a more prominent role in democratization are the negative impact of societal cleavages and conflict on the work of civil society as well as the undemocratic forces of the military or international interventions.

This chapter argues that a pro-democracy First Amendment should also be a pro-union First Amendment. It is an article of faith that a significant purpose of the First Amendment is to enable and improve democracy, by helping Americans access the information they need for democratic deliberation and participation. Further, a considerable body of research shows that labor unions make American democracy stronger and more representative. But despite this, the Supreme Court has treated unions’ political advocacy in cases involving union agency fees with suspicion and disdain. After describing this unfortunate situation – one that is likely to get worse under the current Supreme Court – the chapter closes on a note of optimism, looking ahead to a time when scholars and advocates can realistically begin the work of rebuilding a First Amendment that recognizes labor unions as democracy-enhancing institutions.