Industrial Conflict in Advanced Industrial Societies.

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Abstract

This study focuses on strike activity during the 1950–1969 period in ten industrial societies, The first section of the paper deals with issues of strike measurement and introduces a three-dimensional characterization of strike activity which forms the basis of the subsequent statistical analyses. The next section examines postwar trends in industrial conflict in order to evaluate the argument that strike activity is “withering away” in advanced industrial societies. Time plots of the aggregate volume of industrial conflict show that there has been no general downward movement in strike activity during the postwar period.

The third part of the paper develops a number of theoretically plausible statistical models to explain year-to-year fluctuations in the volume of strikes. The empirical results of this section indicate that (1) there is a pronounced inverse relationship between strike activity and the level of unemployment, which suggests that on the whole strikes are timed to capitalize on the strategic advantages of a tight labor market; (2) industrial conflict responds to movements in real wages rather than money wages, which indicates that labor is not misled by a “money illusion”; (3) Labor and Socialist parties are not able to deter strike activity in the short-run despite their strong electoral incentive to do so; and (4) the volume of strikes does seem to be influenced by the relative size of Communist parties, which suggests that such parties remain important agencies for the mobilization of discontent and the crystallization of labor-capital cleavages.

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Short-Term Fluctuations in U.S. Voting Behavior, 1896–1964

Gerald Kramer (1971)

This paper develops several simple multivariate statistical models and applies them to explain fluctuations in the aggregate vote for the United States House of Representatives, over the period 1896-1964. The basic hypothesis underlying these models is that voters are rational in at least the limited sense that their decisions as to whether to vote for an incumbent administration depend on whether its performance has been “satisfactory” according to some simple standard. Because of data limitations, the analysis focuses on measures of economic performance, treating other aspects of an incumbent's performance, such as its handling of foreign affairs, as stochastic perturbations of the underlying relationship to be estimated. (Examination of residuals suggests this assumption is not unreasonable, at least during peacetime.) Possible effects of coattails from presidential races, of incumbency, and of secular trends in the underlying partisanship of the electorate are also taken into account. The models, estimated by maximum-likelihood methods, are found to be successful. Close to two-thirds of the variance in the vote series is accounted for, and the structural coefficients of the models are of the correct signs and of quite reasonable magnitudes. Economic growth, as measured by the changes in real per capita income, is the major economic variable; unemployment or inflation have little independent effect. Presidential coattails are also found to be of some importance.