The Revenge of Unions?: General Strikes’ Impact on Attitudes Towards Left Governments in Spain

The political links between unions and left parties in Western Europe have witnessed notable strain over the last four decades. While there is a lack of consensus as to how severe the “de-linking” of labor and the left is, there is growing acceptance that: 1.) unions’ influence on left parties has been curbed by their organizational decline, and; 2.) left parties across Europe have pursued more pro-market positions, deviating from organized labor’s ideological foundations, in order to cater to new constituents. We question whether unions’ are still able to inflict political costs on left parties whose policies break from social democratic traditions by focusing on whether general strikes (perhaps the most serious protest vehicle against policy reform that unions have at their disposal) inflict different political penalties on left versus right governments. Employing a (distributive lag) time-series analysis of quarterly polling data in Spain (a most-likely case for the delinking literature), we track how public opinion on government performance and voting intentions for left and right executives respond to general strikes. Our findings indicate that general strikes’ impact on Spanish public opinion towards government displays a left partisan bias. Spain’s major left party (PSOE) incurred significant public opinion penalties (both for the expressed voting intentions and the assessment of PSOE Prime Ministers) if a general strike occurred while it held power. In contrast, Popular Party (PP) governments incurred no public opinion penalties for strikes that occurred under their watch.