Blue Endorsements Matter: How the Fraternal Order of Police Contributed to Donald Trump’s Victory

ABSTRACTConventional accounts of Donald Trump’s unexpected electoral victory stress idiosyncratic events and media celebrity because most observers assume this unusual candidate won without much organized support. However, considerable evidence suggests that the support of conservative organizational networks, including police unions such as the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), propelled Trump to victory. The FOP is both a public-sector union and a conservative, mass-membership fraternal association that was courted by the Trump campaign at a time of politically charged debates about policing. Four years before, the FOP had refused to endorse Republican candidate Mitt Romney because he opposed public-sector unionism, which provided fruitful and rare variation in interest-group behavior across electoral cycles. Using a difference-in-differences approach, I find that FOP lodge density contributed to a significant swing in vote share from Romney to Trump. Moreover, survey evidence indicates that police officers reported increased political engagement in 2016 versus 2012. Belying the notion that Trump lacked a “ground game,” this research suggests that he tapped into existing organizational networks, showing their enduring importance in electoral politics.

Bashing Public Employees and Their Unions

This chapter considers the idea of governmental “sovereignty,” as used by the right, to undermine the rationale for collective bargaining in the public sector. From the Boston Police Strike of 1919 forward, conservatives have considered the organization of government workers to be incompatible with the sovereign status of those entities sustained by taxes and elected by the populace. Public employee unions subverted the will of elected officeholders and undermined state power. That antiunion ideology faded in the two decades after 1958 when public employee unionism grew by leaps and bounds, but in recent years it has returned, albeit in a distinctively neoliberal, antistate guise. Conservatives today charge that instead of challenging the power of the state, public sector unionism is illegitimate because these institutions support those governmental functions that regulate commerce, sustain public education, and provide other public goods now under attack from the neoliberal right.

Collective bargaining: An analysis of hurdles and applicability in the public sector

This article discusses the arguments against adopting collective bargaining in the public sector and its benefits. Collective bargaining in the public sector is viewed primarily as undermining democratic governance in one way and paradoxically it is seen as an essential part of democratic governance. In the former view, collective bargaining in the public sector is seen as an interference with administrative law for personal benefit to the detriment of the taxpayer. Proponents of this view argue that unionising public sector employees encourages disloyalty to the government at the expense of public welfare. In the later view, public sector collective bargaining is viewed as a fundamental human right in a pluralistic society. Advocates of this view posit that, public sector unions provide a collective voice that stimulates improvement of government services as well as sound administration of law. They also argue that, public sector collective bargaining represents public policy interests and serves as a watchdog to government’s monopoly power in employment matters. Public sector unions raise employee salaries and perks to levels higher than they would have been in the absence of collective bargaining. These two opposite views are subjected to a critical analysis in this paper, with empirical evidence for both the benefits of public sector collective bargaining and arguments against public sector unions. The article found that public sector collective bargaining depends on the socio-economic background of states although international laws favour public sector unionism.

Public Sector Unions Need the Private Sector or Why the Wisconsin Protests Were Not Labor's Lazarus Moment

I argue that the extension of collective bargaining rights and formation of public sector labor unions requires the prior existence of these rights among significant sections of the private sector economy. The secular decline in private sector unionization will undermine the political bases of support for public sector unions. I demonstrate that public sector unionism emerged where private sector unions were initially strong. Declining private sector unionism has led to a marked decrease in support for public sector unions. The diminution of their allies in the private sector and the prospect of extended periods of austerity at the state and local level have put public sector unions in a precarious position that Republican governors and legislatures are taking full advantage of. The prospects for renewal in the labor movement are dim.