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Political Concepts
A Working Paper Series of the Committee on Concepts and Methods
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| Emmanuel Teitelbaum, "Measuring Trade Union Rights Through Observed Violations: An Assessment," May 2009 |
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| Abstract | | Despite a burgeoning literature on the relationship between labor standards and economic outcomes, there is little consensus on how best to measure labor rights. This paper examines a prominent method of measuring labor rights developed by Kucera (2007) that is based on coding observed violations of freedom of association and collective bargaining (FACB) rights in textual sources. I use Item Response Theory to assess whether the component items used to construct the index relate to the same underlying concept and to generate a more scientific index based on the component items. The news is mostly good for proponents of Kucera’s method. The items relate to the same latent variable, which I argue should be construed as ‘the propensity to violate labor rights’. However, the analysis also raises questions about the ability of the method to adequately distinguish between countries known to have excellent respect for workers’ rights and extremely repressive countries. The problem appears to stem from measuring countries with highly mobilized labor movements and countries with little or no labor mobilization on the same scale. I suggest some corrections for this problem and use the newly constructed measures to analyze the relationship between labor rights and foreign direct investment. I find a positive relationship between my revised measures of FACB rights and investment flows. |
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C&M
The Committee on Concepts and Methods
International Political Science Association (IPSA)
Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas (CIDE)
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