That political candidates seek the support of broad constituencies—whether demographic, religious, gender-based, or geographic, among others—is understood and intuitive. However, the actual influence of such constituencies, though debated for many decades, is still little understood. This is especially the case in terms of business and labor interests, which, if such political influence exists, can not only sway elections but the public policies that follow.
This work addresses that gap by focusing on the influence of organized labor in Great Britain from 1900-2019. Organized labor is a particularly useful group to study as it has turned its bargaining power with business into political influence at the ballot box, regularly funding political campaigns, hiring party employees, and promising to deliver votes. Organized labor has sponsored thousands of candidates during the 20th century and beyond, especially in western and northern
Europe, accounting for much of the funding for many left-leaning candidates.
Are these financial links effective? To what degree does union sponsorship drive election results in modern democracies? Empirical challenges have long hindered researchers trying to answer those and related questions, but Alexander Fouirnaies of UChicago’s Harris School of Public Policy collects new data from the archives of the Labour Party and British Unions on sponsorship agreements from the founding of the party in 1900 until the sponsorship institution was abolished in 1996, producing the longest-spanning dataset on financial links between electoral candidates and interest groups ever collected. These data allow Fouirnaies to study how union sponsorship affected the electoral prospect of parliamentary candidates in Great Britain—who were either completely beholden to a single union, or not financially tied to any interest group at all—over the course of the 20th century.
To describe his findings, let’s begin with a review of the following figure:
This figure shows how the average vote share of candidates sponsored by the union (union sponsees) developed relative to other Labour candidates. In the pretreatment period, sponsees and other Labour candidates essentially followed the same trend, but once they attain a union sponsorship, sponsees systematically improved their electoral fortune relative to other Labour candidates. This leads to Fouirnaies’s first finding:
- On average, union sponsorship caused a 6 percentage-point increase in candidate vote shares. Please see the working paper for discussion, but Fouirnaies shows that union sponsorship was indeed the causal factor for increased vote-getting; that is, it was not the case that improved electoral prospects affect the probability that a candidate attained sponsorship.
- What is the mechanism for this electoral influence? To examine this question, Fouirnaies studies whether union sponsorship affected the electoral fortune of Labour candidates through changes in constituencies or opponents, or through changes in resources, mobilization, or information, to find the following:
- Electoral effects were primarily driven by better constituencies and more resources. Sponsorship helped candidates get nominated in electorally attractive constituencies, and this can account for approximately two-thirds of the main effect.
- Sponsorship caused an inflow of financial and human resources into constituencies, engendering a professionalization of political campaigns.
- Finally, taken together, these results suggest that union sponsorship promoted the representation of union-friendly candidates in parliament. However, while this may have shifted the balance of power between factions within the Labour Party, it only had a moderate impact on the balance of power between political parties.
By providing an empirical methodology for examining the role of interest groups in elections, this work has implications beyond the Labour Party in 20th century Britain. While Fouirnaies is careful about over extrapolating to other political contexts from this one study, he does reinforce that the underlying mechanisms by which all interest groups affect elections bear similarities. Thus, this work provides a roadmap for not only exploring election outcomes, but also how interest groups affect policymaking via individual lawmakers.