Partisanship, union centralization, and mobility: The political roots of interindustry labor mobility

This dissertation analyzes the relationship between the partisanship of governments and the corresponding levels of interindustry labor mobility. From a general equilibrium model, I show that high levels of ILM induce greater class solidarity among labor owners while weakening the solidarity among capital owners. The reverse holds for low levels of ILM. Left governments would benefit from having a more unified working-class base and would therefore prefer high levels of ILM. For equivalent reasons, Right governments would prefer low levels of ILM. Such partisan divergences in preferred levels of ILM could, however, be moderated with the strengthening of centralized labor unions, which may substitute the incentives of the Left governments for high ILM while constraining the actions by the Right for low ILM levels. I develop and test a series of conditional hypotheses concerning the interaction of government partisanship and union centralization on ILM levels, and find that Left governments will be associated with higher levels of ILM than Right governments when the level of domestic union centralization is low; furthermore, more centralized union movement tends to induce significant behavior changes for the Right governments but not for the Left governments as far as levels of ILM are concerned. I also argue and show that one mechanism through which partisan governments can cause the changes of interindustry labor mobility levels is the manipulation of certain labor market policies.;In the process of quantitative analyses, I construct innovative new measures of interindustry labor mobility based on the formal definition of ILM as the elasticity of labor supply across industries upon interindustry wage differentials. The measures are at country-year level, but they can also be disaggregated into country-year-industry level. The relationship between partisan politics and interindustry labor mobility is corroborated and further explored by case studies of Sweden and the US.