Public‐Sector Unions and the Size of Government

Public‐sector unions are generally thought to increase the size of government through collective bargaining. This article challenges this idea for the case of teacher unions in the United States and argues that while collective bargaining institutions sometimes lead to increased education spending, this is not the norm. Using a new longitudinal data set spanning all states before and after they granted collective bargaining rights to teachers, the article shows that although states that mandate districts to bargain with teachers have higher education expenditures than states that do not, the differences precede collective bargaining. Difference‐in‐differences analyses find no evidence that introducing collective bargaining rights led to average increases in the level of resources devoted to education. Although existing theories cannot explain these null findings, the article shows one reason behind them is that most laws granting collective bargaining rights to teachers were not unambiguously prolabor, but included both pro‐ and anti‐union provisions.