perspective these variations are lost when figures are aggregated to the national level.
Likewise the link between economic globalization and its impact on the civility of society
becomes increasingly tenuous as concepts like strike activity or protests are aggregated to
the national level. How can we be sure that any associations found at the national level
are not statistical artifacts generated through processes of aggregation?
This paper has three sections. First, we review three lines of research that bear on
the way globalization could affect strike activity. Two focus on bargaining between labor
and capital, and the third focuses on workers' sense of relative deprivation. Next, we set
out a research design for testing hypotheses drawn from these three theoretical
perspectives using data on strike activity in the 50 American states between 1964 and
1980. A third section presents our empirical results, and a final section summarizes and
concludes.
Our results suggest that globalization reduced strike activity in the United States,
supporting the expectations of the mobilization literature. Increasing competition from
imported manufactures during the 1970s not only reduced strike activity directly, but may
also have had an additional indirect effect by reducing union density. Globalization may
increase other kinds of protest, as the relative deprivation literature suggests it should, but
our results suggest that strike activity is different.
1.2 Economic Globalization, Domestic Instability, and Strike Activity
There is considerable debate about the consequences of countries integrating their
national economies into the international economic system. Different types of
globalization have been identified from economic globalization to cultural globalization,
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Convention