JULY 13 , 2012

MULTIPLE METHODS III

PUZZLE: THE LENIN PROBLEM

• 1. Why can some membership organizations expand their scope of action, that is expand the community of fate?• Why are some organizations successful at encouraging

costly political actions that transcend self-interest?• Why are some organizations able to achieve compliance

with political actions that were not the reason for joining?

• 2. Related questions: Do preferences and beliefs change? Why and how?

HISTORY OF PROJECT• My previous work• Dissertation on labor unions• Work on quasi-voluntary compliance and contingent consent• Work on trust

• Harry Bridges Chair• Democracy Reexamined project (starting in 2001)• Funding from Labor Studies Center & also RSF• Conference• Article in Politics & Society

• NSF funding, 2005-7, 2007-10 (almost $500,000)• Article in Annual Review of Political Science• Workshop on book manuscript• Articles• Going through editorial process

SCOPE CONDITIONS• For this project:• Unions in transport sector that existed in 1930s and still exist• Heterogeneous membership in terms of political beliefs • Nominally democratic governance• In democratic regimes• Experienced changes over time• Leadership• Technological• Governmental (of country)—makes a difference for NLRA in U.S., regulatory

regime in Australia• Economic

• More generally• Membership organizations• Maybe democratic governments

CASE SELECTION

OUR ARGUMENT• Components• Leadership• Organizational governance institutions• Material benefits and economic success• Contingent consent

• Process involves leaders who • Help the union achieve the economic goals of the union• Announce principles they pledge to uphold• Create governance arrangements that make • leadership commitments credible• Facilitate (or block) membership challenges

• Maintain processes and institutions that either induce consensual maintenance of the principles or compel members to act as if they consent.

ESTABLISHING THE DEPENDENT VARIABLE

• The 1997 boycott of the Neptune Jade and the 1998 closure of the Port of Oakland to protest the ship loaded by strikebreakers in Liverpool. The ILWU boycott inspired subsequent refusals to work the ship in Vancouver, Yokohama, and Kobe.

• The 1989-92 boycott of coffee cargo from El Salvador to in response to the killing of six Jesuit priests by US-supported right wing death squads.

• The 1981 refusal to handle military cargo bound for El Salvador• The sustained refusal of ILWU locals, especially Local 10 (Oakland/San

Francisco), to handle cargo from Apartheid South Africa throughout the 1980s.

• The 1980-81 boycott of Iranian shipping in response to the hostage crisis• The 1974 boycott of Chilean cargo in response to the US-backed Pinochet

coup• In 1939 the ILWU refused to load scrap iron heading for Japan in response

to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria

APPROACH AND METHODS• Analytic narrative• Generating theory through formal model

• Actors, motivational assumption, context, • Non-intuitive implications• Testable implications

• Case studies• Archival material• Oral histories• Interviews• Content analysis• Analysis of electoral rolls• Maps drawn from membership addresses• Secondary sources

• Reconsideration of theory• Reconsidering case material• Statistical material

ISSUE

• Generating theory from data used to test theory?

DEVELOPING THE THEORY

• Review of secondary literature on these unions

• Some experience with data• Overwhelmed by it• Makes us aware of what other literatures we need to read

• Intuitions developed to guide data collection

• Formal model

WHY WE NEED LEADERSHIPCoordination

Direction

Decision-making

Inspiration, i.e. belief change

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FEATURES OF LEADERSHIP

• Relational but Asymmetric• Salient• Domain specific• Instrumental—get others to do something leader (and perhaps group as well) see as necessary• Solve coordination problem• Provide a model of world that requires

coordinated action• Transform beliefs and perhaps preferences

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STRUCTURAL THEORY OF LEADERSHIP

Derives from social choice

Solving the instability caused by multiple equilibria

Leaders structure beliefs about: What game followers are in What equilibrium to prefer

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INFORMATIONAL THEORY OF LEADERSHIP

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•Derives from coordination problems

•Agents have symmetric preferences but incomplete information about beliefs and interests of others

• Leaders provide information about• Others• How to act

INFORMATIONAL THEORIES: HERMALIN

• Leaders as possessors of privileged and valuable information in contexts of moral hazard in team production• Must credibly convey that information• Can “sacrifice” by providing an out of pocket gift to team

members• Can “lead by example” by exerting costly effort which

contributes to the overall production• “Lead by example” produces superior outcome BUT still

an incomplete and imperfect contract between leaders and followers

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INFORMATIONAL THEORY: DEWAN & MAYATT

•Mass with a “need for direction”•Activists who must coordinate if an action to be achieved but have trouble doing so•A leader who possesses public information and signals a “sense of direction”, which under certain conditions, is followed•Need for coordination in situation of uncertainty may facilitate leader manipulations

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EMPIRICAL FINDINGS FROM LITERATURE

• Evidence that salient leader helps groups overcome coordination problems• But evidence poses challenge to economics-of-

information approach• Little evidence of learning or persuasion among

followers• Biases of followers towards messages received from

leaders

• Some evidence that it is possible to transform beliefs about state of world

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OUR MODEL

• Leadership rents as a costly investment by members to provide incentives to leaders to provide good information• Compensation• Side payments (corruption)• Political goals

• Equilibrium requires rents members are willing to tolerate• Leader can fight off challengers if develop a

reputation for good leadership at the appropriate rent

SOURCE OF LEADERS’ PRINCIPLES

• Can provide biographies• i.e. Communism

• Contingency

• No systematic or theoretical answer—a different question than ours

• BUT do know that principles of leader matters..

CASE STUDIES

• Teamsters and ILA

• ILWU and WWF

• Challenges to leadership• Dissident locals and factions• How they are dealt with

UPDATING THEORY

• Observations of changes, perhaps caused by• “pleasure in agency”• Network effects• “Surprises” that reveal what preferences are

• So theory needs to account for preference provocation: endogenous sources of belief and preference change

• Revise formal model to incorporate mechanisms• Value of leader so great that outweighs costs of contributing to

and toleration leaders’ political goals• Importance of institutions that allow members to challenge

leaders electorally and have a probability of winning• Desire of members to be part of the group

TESTABLE IMPLICATIONS

• Transformation in the thinking of the members• Leadership communication with members not

only to “frame” her proposals and attempt to persuade the members that her course of action is correct but also to provide a venue in which members observe one another • Sustained but loyal opposition to the leader who

may oppose the leader on some issues but abide by the group’s decisions, so long as they are procedurally transparent

MAKES SENSE OF WHAT WE COULDN’T EXPLAIN BEFORE

• the ILWU’s Educational Committee and its LEAD Institute • WWF’s renowned Film Unit• major union papers, The Dispatcher and The

Wharfie

STATISTICAL TESTS

• Survey

• Matching

• Regression