Union Experience and Worker Policy

Unions influence the U.S. political process in numerous ways. Although scholarship has examined labor’s effects on political office-holding, less research is available on the relationship between unions and legislator policy choice. In this article, I use theories of social identification, civic engagement, and intergenerational transfer of political values to explore the relationship between various definitions of a legislator’s prior union experience and his or her roll-call voting once in office. I employ multilevel mixed-effects regressions to analyze 2,427 federal and statewide worker-related votes cast by California’s legislators from 1999 to 2012. Results indicate that higher probabilities of having worked in a unionized occupation or having a family member who belonged to a union are positively associated with voting for union-supported issues. The relationship is not cumulative, however, and is moderated by factors both endogenous and exogenous to the legislator.