Abstract
Organizations play a critical role in developing citizen political participation. Though unions are one of the few organizations focused on the social and economic well-being of the less advantaged in America, little is known about the processes and mechanisms by which they promote the political participation of workers. We use data from semi-structured interviews with teacher candidates for state office in the 2018 midterm elections to describe how their unions shaped their political engagement and their candidacies in particular. We find that teachers’ unions acted as “schools of democracy” in a series of three developmental stages revolving around (1) political awareness (knowledge, skills, and political identities), (2) political ambition (political efficacy and mobilization), and (3) political support (material resources and political capital). Our qualitative approach allows us to “peer into the black box” of candidate emergence to detail the long-term and often hidden mechanisms that enable unions to promote the political engagement of their members. We extend prior research on political organizations by illuminating how organizations help candidates—particularly those from underrepresented groups—develop their political skills, foster interest in public office, and ultimately support their campaigns.
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Data Availability
Data with analytic codes are available at the Political Behavior Dataverse page: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/ENUFXJ.
Code Availability
Dedoose is the only software used in this research. No custom code was used.
Notes
All research participants have been given pseudonyms and are described with gender-neutral pronouns.
In his review, Gulzar (2021) emphasizes that “tracing the pipeline of political entry before it formally occurs could provide insights into how the political class may be broadened” (p.17).
There are roughly 2.5 million teachers’ union members in the United States (Hirch & Macpherson, 2022), comprising 76% of the teacher workforce (U.S. Department of Education).
Data with analytic codes are available at the Political Behavior Dataverse page: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/ENUFXJ.
This process lasted from December 2018 to May 2019, at which point it was too late to contact additional candidates. Many campaign websites had been removed and campaign email addresses were no longer valid.
There was great debate in the media regarding the extent to which teachers were running for office (Wong 2018); thus, it was critical that we independently establish an accurate count.
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Acknowledgements
We are very grateful for the support of our collaborator on this project, Bradley Marianno. This research also benefitted immensely from the helpful feedback of Jeff Henig, Sarah Reckhow, and the seminar participants at the 2021 Michigan State University American Politics Workshop and the 2021 APSA Education Policy and Politics Workshop. All errors of either fact or interpretation belong solely to the authors.
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Melissa Arnold Lyon conceived of the presented idea; collected the data; performed the analysis; wrote the paper. Annie A. Hemphill collected the data; performed the analysis; wrote the paper. Rebecca Jacobsen collected the data; performed the analysis; contributed to the development of the paper.
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Lyon, M.A., Hemphill, A.A. & Jacobsen, R. How Do Unions Create Candidates?. Polit Behav 46, 209–231 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-022-09818-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-022-09818-x