“Looking out for Outsiders?:: Mapping Solidarity across Advanced Industrial Democracies.”

What explains individuals’ support for unions? Much of existing scholarship on labor unions finds a crisis of unionism and documents the widespread decline of organized labor in terms of union membership and the scope of collective bargaining. In order to study over time developments in individual support for the role of unions, we employ data from the Work Orientations modules of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) taken from 1989, 2005, and 2015. Multi-level models allow us to include country-level characteristics from the Database on Institutional Characteristics of Trade Unions, Wage Setting, State Intervention and Social Pacts (ICTWSS). With this data, we are able to investigate a couple of dimensions. First, we study how the support for unions has evolved over time and whether there are pre- and post-crisis differences. Second, we explore how the national context of collective bargaining shapes perceptions about the importance of unions’ role. Third, engaging with the debate on labor market dualism, we decipher differences between labor market insiders and outsiders in their views about unions across cases and time.