Introduction
It has been well established that institutions have an impact on the development of
the society they structure. As Crepaz (1998:61) puts it, “It is now generally agreed that
institutions matter.” From North’s (1990) work on path dependence to Lipset and
Marks’s (2000) discussion of socialism and American institutions, it has become
accepted wisdom that the “rules of the game” are important considerations in questions of
politics and policy. How the rules work, and how susceptible they are to manipulation,
can mean the difference between policy outcomes that privilege a group and policies that
harm that same group. An example of this is the lack of successful third party candidates
in the United States, an outcome that is often directly attributed to a majoritarian electoral
system that privileges the two most popular candidates and disadvantages losing
candidates. Along these same lines, it stands to reason that institutions, by structuring
government-citizen interactions, can also have an impact on how social movements and
interest groups function.
This paper is a preliminary investigation into the interaction between the
institutions of a country and the labour movement. Specifically, I am interested in
understanding to what extent the institutional structure of a country affects the
development and strength of organized labour. I look at two particular institutions -
federalism and party discipline – and how they might privilege or disadvantage the labour
movement. Each of these features is largely static (save for periods of radical reform),
and comprises part of the “rules” of the game of legislating.
Convention