Political Ideology, Policy Responsiveness, and Collective Bargaining Laws.

The contemporary relevance of collective bargaining in education is widely debated in the scholarly literature (Hoxby 1996). Despite previous studies analyzing the political influence of teacher unions in federal policy development, there is relatively little attention on how labor unions gained public legitimacy as political institutions at the state level. To complement the recent growth in scholarly attention to labor unions in voter turnout, party voting, and class mobilization (Leighley and Nagler 2007), this paper considers the political and economic influences on collective bargaining rights for public school teachers. A second motivation for this research study is the substantive relevance of partisan and ideological considerations for education policy. The historical context of policy innovation is an increasingly salient topic for practitioners and scholars with the emergence of a new generation of public school reformers who believe the time has come to reconsider how federal and state authorities regulate the teacher labor market. While previous studies look at policy adoption under federal influence (Karch 2006) and interstate competition (Boehmke and Witmer 2004), interstate policy development has just recently been systematically examined in the political science literature. This research study uses a new longitudinal data collection of state legislative activity over fifty years. Our methodological approach builds on a recent investigation of children's health insurance programs (Volden 2006) to explore rival theories of policy learning and change in collective bargaining. Overall, this conference paper will promote the development of scientific theory on how political institutions respond to the challenge of education reform. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]