Amanda Gosling

British Unions in Decline: Determinants of the 1980s Fall in Union Recognition

This examination of establishment-level data from the Workplace Industrial Relations Surveys of 1980, 1984, and 1990 shows that the proportion of British establishments (that is, workplaces in both the private and public sector) that recognized unions for collective bargaining over pay and working conditions fell by almost 20% between 1980 and 1990. Largely accountable for this decline was a much lower rate of union recognition in establishments founded in the 1980s than in previous years, particularly in the private sector. Citing these findings, as well as recent structural changes in employment in the British labor market (such as the shift from manufacturing to services, from manual to non-manual employment, and from full-time to part-time work) and a government that continues to enact anti-union legislation, the authors foresee no reversal of unions decline in the 1990s.

What Has Happened to Union Recognition in Britain

This paper examines the determinants of union recognition status using data from the three Workplace Industrial Relations Surveys of 1980, 1984 and 1990. Our theoretical approach argues that the level of industry quasi-rents and union density at the time of the establishments set-up should be considered the crucial determinants of recognition status. Confirmation of these predictions is found for private sector manufacturing establishments in the econometric analysis. Of particular interest are the non-linear relationship between historic industry quasi-rents and recognition status and the stability of the model over the three data sets, although there is evidence for a marked downward shift in recognition probabilities during the 1980s.

The Culture War and Issue Salience: An Analysis of American Sentiment on Traditional Moral Issues

Despite much talk of a culture war, scholars continue to argue over whether the American public is divided on cultural and social issues. Some of the most prominent work in this area, such as Fiorinas Culture War? , has rejected the idea. However, this work has in turn been criticized for focussing only on the distribution of attitudes within the American public and ignoring the possibility that the culture war may also be driven by the increasing strength with which sections of the population hold their opinions. This paper tests the strength, or saliency, hypothesis using individual-level over-time data and nonlinear regression. It finds (1) that there was a steady and significant increase in concern about traditional moral issues between the early 1980s and 2000, but (2) that the over-time increase was driven by an upward and equal shift in the importance attached to traditional moral issues by Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, evangelicals and non-evangelicals, and frequent and infrequent worshippers alike. While the first finding offers support for the saliency hypothesis and the culture war thesis, the second challenges the idea that Americans are engaged in a war over culture. Both findings enhance but also complicate our theoretical understanding of the culture war, and have important real-world consequences for American politics.

Correction of misclassification error in disability rates.

This paper examines misclassification error in survey estimates of disability. The results suggest that a significant number of those with a disability fail to be recorded as such in the British Household Panel Survey. In addition, the probability of a false positive is estimated as being very close to zero in all socio-demographic groups. There is a strong bias in estimates of differences in rates of disability across groups but only a small effect on estimates of the difference in employment rates by disability status.