Democrats backed pro-union legislation partly to entrench their own electoral support.

Evidence

Thus, while in recent decades Republicans have sought to use their offices to undermine union strength in order to neutralize Democratic opposition, Democratic officeholders have just as aggressively sought to bolster unions in order to shore up their own electoral prospects. At the federal level, for example, Congress recently debated the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), a bill that would have made private-sector unionization substantially easier. Nearly the entire Democratic caucus in both the House and Senate supported the bill. While there were legitimate labor-policy reasons to support EFCA, Democrats could not have missed the possibility that increasing unionization rates and the political power of organized labor would improve their electoral prospects. — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 248

Categorization

• XREF: Mirrors the reader’s prior work on parties as policy-driven self-entrenchment coalitions (e.g., Binder & Malzman, and academic treatments of electoral manipulation as mutual escalation rather than one-sided). — connects to: Southern Democrats used labor law to block CIO-driven voter realignment — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 211; Parties entrench themselves by writing the rules of party structure and ballot access — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 90; Trade unions can be co-opted to contain working-class opposition

Broader Connections

• Parties entrench themselves by writing the rules of party structure and ballot access #expands (0.88) — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 90
• Trade unions can be co-opted to contain working-class opposition #expands (0.78)