(Illustration by Juan Bernabeu)
Soaring levels of political polarization and civic disengagement in the United States are hardly new, but not every organization is failing to overcome the growing divides in American society. A new paper by Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, an associate professor of political science at Columbia University, shows how a large public sector labor union, the Iowa State Education Association (ISEA), has managed to recruit and engage new members in an increasingly partisan climate.
During a research trip to Iowa to study conservative and progressive cross-state networks of lawmakers and interest groups, Hertel-Fernandez met with the state’s largest teachers’ union. The encounter turned into a long-term partnership that provided a source of new data and a broader understanding of some of the challenges facing civic associations, long heralded as the backbone of American democracy. Hertel-Fernandez wanted to know: How was the teachers’ association making successful political appeals to conservative and Republican educators who held different views from the union on political causes, candidates, and issues? Furthermore, how was the union bringing together Republicans, Democrats, conservatives, and liberals to participate in political events and activities?
Hertel-Fernandez found answers in the data generated by some 400 local unions that belong to the ISEA. “In the social sciences, one of the challenges of studying civil-society organizations is the difficulty of getting off-the-shelf data, especially to answer some of the more interesting and important questions,” Hertel-Fernandez says. “Unlike, say, studying members of Congress, where legislation is all listed publicly, votes are all listed publicly, and campaign contributions are listed publicly, civil-society organizations are often a black box.
Collaborating with the union allowed Hertel-Fernandez to peer inside the black box. Analyzing surveys of educators who were union members, internal data on political participation by those members, and interviews, he discovered how union leaders fostered norms that encouraged all members to participate in politics.
“There are two important aspects of this leadership,” Hertel-Fernandez says. “One is establishing a strong first impression and making it part of the norm of what’s expected if you’re going to be a member. Part two is moving past national political debates to focus on how politics affects a local school or the community.” Because the ISEA negotiates and bargains at the local level, it can frame political questions and debates in terms of community interests, Hertel-Fernandez observed, even during pitched national battles over abortion and other divisive matters.
“One highly effective strategy I saw local leaders employing to try and recruit these conservative and Republican members in politics was denationalizing conversations about politics,” Hertel-Fernandez says. “They can do that because while they’re part of this national federation, they operate at the local level.”
Locally, union members could engage in political activities such as talking to coworkers, friends, families, and neighbors, while more formal participation took the form of contributing to the union’s political action committee, an important tool for the union to exercise a voice in politics by giving endorsements and contributions to candidates who run for local and state races in any given election cycle.
Since Hertel-Fernandez began his research, many more public sector workers and teachers’ unions are located in right-to-work states. Iowa has tilted to the right in recent years, passing laws that make it more difficult to organize and collectively bargain. The strategies employed by the ISEA to reach out to Republicans and conservatives will likely be applicable in other contexts where unions operate in unfriendly environments. Civic organizations that are federated, or that have a local state presence alongside a national one, often have members who don’t agree with every stand the organization takes.
“This study is a breath of fresh air in a time when political science literature has been focused on the nationalization and polarization of partisan identities,” says Leslie Finger, an assistant professor of political science at the University of North Texas. “Rather than showing the ways in which Republicans and Democrats have become increasingly acrimonious and socially and geographically segregated, this study highlights ways in which membership organizations can overcome these divides and build organizational norms and cultures that appeal across party lines.”
Find the full study: “Civic Organizations and the Political Participation of Cross-Pressured Americans: The Case of the Labor Movement” by Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, American Political Science Review, forthcoming.
Read more stories by Daniela Blei.