Union Membership and Voting for Cope-Endorsed Candidates

Abstract

The authors investigate whether, as commonly believed, union members and their families strongly support the political candidates endorsed by union leaders. Using 1978 data on U.S. Senate, U.S. House of Representatives, and gubernatorial races, they find that union members, and to a lesser extent the nonmembers in their families, were more likely to vote for candidates endorsed by the AFL-CIO's Committee on Political Education (COPE) than were individuals who did not belong to a union and lived in households containing no union members. The authors suggest several alternative explanations for this pattern of voting behavior and discuss the implications of their results for unions' political strategy.