Date:
Location:
Speaker
Kiara Hernandez, "Firm-level Ethnoracial Diversity and Support for Unionization"
Abstract
In the United States today, mass preferences for fiscal and social spending policies appear minimally responsive to rising earnings inequality and rapidly deteriorating job protections. Theories of political behavior and political economy maintain that because individuals’ preferences for redistribution depend on whether they perceive racial outgroups to be policy beneficiaries, racial animus may explain the mismatch between contemporary inequality and redistributive preferences. However, this literature largely conceptualizes redistribution as zero-sum. In this paper, I ask how redistributive preferences change when both ingroup and outgroup stand to benefit from a policy outcome. I consider one redistributive outcome – unionization – and look at its relationship to the ethnoracial composition of the 170 largest retail firms in the U.S. Using survey data collected through The Shift Project in the spring of 2023 (n=19,333), I find that greater workplace ethnoracial diversity is associated with lower support for unionization. I conduct sensitivity analyses and find that the result is robust to a number of demographic controls and is not driven by firm- or state-level trends. I explore several moderating variables that highlight how within-firm structural factors may explain the relationship between diversity and unionization.
The American Politics Research Workshop (Gov 3004) meets all academic year, Tuesdays, 12:00 - 2:00 PM, in CGIS K354. This workshop presents an opportunity for graduate students and Harvard faculty to present and receive feedback on their current research. The workshop highlights key theoretical and empirical findings from Harvard affiliates on topics related to American politics.
All interested Harvard affiliates are invited to attend.