A Strike against the Left: General Strikes and Public Opinion of Incumbent Governments in Spain

Abstract

Political links between labor unions and leftist political parties have weakened over the last four decades in Western Europe, reducing the former’s influence on the latter. Unions’ prolonged organizational decline suggests that their capacity to pressure left parties should become more limited. We examine whether unions can use general strikes to influence public opinion when left parties in government pursue austerity policies. Executing a distributive lag time series analysis of quarterly public opinion data from 1986 to 2015 in Spain, we find that Socialist governments incurred significant public opinion penalties in the wake of a general strike. Not only did PSOE prime ministers lose confidence from the public, but they also witnessed a significant reduction in voting intentions. In contrast, Spain’s conservative governments incurred no such public opinion penalties in response to general strikes. We conclude that general strikes carry significant political costs for left governments that stray from union ideals.

Keywords

general strikes labor unions left governments public opinion Spain

Introduction

Globalization and the crisis of Keynesianism prompted analyses of the consequences of weakening organizational links between labor unions and leftist political parties in Western Europe (Allern and Bale, 2017; Piazza, 2005). These weakening links are particularly important considering the decline of social democracy and the center-left’s poor electoral performances across developed democracies. Historically, unions and left parties were linked through policy coordination, political cooperation and endorsement, and, in some cases, dual membership policies. Unions were also important mobilizers of some of the left’s (traditional) constituencies—lower-income workers, whose turnout in elections is more precarious than that of the middle class (Pontusson and Rueda, 2010). Consequently, unions were often able to shape the behavior of leftist parties because of their ideological affinities and capacity to buoy left electoral support among low-income voters (Leighley and Nagler, 2007).

Unions’ organizational decline, including membership and density losses, and their weakening collective bargaining power handicap their ability to pressure left governments, particularly those pursuing pro-market reforms (Culpepper and Regan, 2014). The organizational delinking has generally rendered unions less able to mobilize peripheral voters, who do not regularly vote (see Gray and Caul, 2000). At the same time, left parties have moved toward the center to attract new constituencies. These wider processes of delinking have diminished labor’s direct influence on traditionally left parties.

Against this backdrop, do unions still have tools to remain politically relevant in Western Europe? Social pacts with governments are one way unions have influenced policies. Yet, pacts have become less frequent since the Great Recession (Baccaro and Galindo, 2018). In contrast, general strikes have occurred with increasing frequency over the past two decades. General strikes are national-level work stoppages, by workers in multiple industries, against the government in its role as a legislator (see Hyman, 1989). Unions use general strikes to mobilize against governments when they legislate contentious welfare, social, or employment policy reforms.

This article investigates whether general strikes present a way for unions to influence governments. A potential mechanism is strikes’ effects on public opinion. We analyze whether general strikes diminish the public’s approval of the government, and thereby signal to the government that it may face electoral trouble if it proceeds with its policy agenda. In the context of delinking, we specifically assess whether general strikes inflict differentiated public opinion penalties on left compared to right governments. We anticipate that the public opinion effects of strikes will be more detrimental for left governments than right ones, because they emphasize to the left’s traditional base and the public more broadly that they are pursing policies that run counter to the left’s historical commitment to preserving the welfare state and hurt those parties’ voters disproportionately.

Our empirical analysis focuses on Spain from the mid-1980s to 2015. Spain is a useful case to examine the political costs of general strikes. Similar to other Western European countries, it witnessed the formal delinking of left parties and unions in the 1980s, most notably between the Socialist Party (PSOE) and the Workers’ General Union (UGT). Spain’s unions also call general strikes with some regularity, and its political system provides comparatively clear lines of responsibility for political decisions, allowing us to assess whether general strikes affect left and right governments differently. Our distributive lag time series analysis of quarterly public opinion data demonstrates that general strikes dampen approval of the incumbent government and intentions to vote for the governing party when the left is in power. Right governments face no public opinion penalties when strikes occur under their watch. This suggests that general strikes are indeed an effective tool for unions to influence public opinion of governments, but only when the left governs.

Left Party-Union Delinking, General Strikes, and Government Accountability

This section sets the context of the demise of ties between left parties and unions and develops our reasoning for why unions can use general strikes to influence governments, and left governments in particular.

The Demise of Left Party-Union Ties

Unions’ organizational and political decline across Western Europe is well documented (Gall, 2012; Häusermann, 2010; Wallerstein and Western, 2000). Economic changes (the decline of Fordism and manufacturing, increase of precarious employment, globalization, and capital mobility) and political transformations (the rise of neoliberalism, conservative governments’ efforts to weaken collective bargaining laws, and the erosion of collective bargaining and trade union membership) have significantly undermined unions’ power and their political mobilization capacity. These trends have also weakened the capacity of leftist governments to advance social democratic policies and to uphold Keynesian macroeconomic management. With the decline of the (blue-collar) working class, left parties across Western Europe have sought political support from middle-class and white-collar voters (Cioffi and Höpner, 2006), while embracing privatization and neoliberal reforms.

Yet, the degree of left party/union delinking varies across Western Europe (see Gumbrell-McCormick and Hyman, 2013). Weakened party-union ties exist not only in countries with low union density (Parsons, 2015) but also in corporatist strongholds (Allern et al., 2007; see Klitgaard and Nørgaard, 2014 for an opposing view). Yet, others note that union/left party linkages continue to persist, albeit weakened (see Öberg et al., 2011; for a general assessment, see Simoni, 2013). Regardless, very few scholars argue that unions are still in a strong position to penalize left governments deviating from social democratic platforms, and there is broad agreement that unions have a limited range of strategies to respond to their political marginalization. Social pacts pose one way in which unions retained political presence and influence; however, these national-level agreements between unions and governments (and sometimes employers) have declined precipitously since the onset of the Great Recession (Baccaro and Galindo, 2018). Here, we challenge the presumption of the demise of union influence on governments by examining whether unions can exert indirect influence on left parties when they govern by moving public opinion against them via general strikes.

General Strikes, Public Opinion, and Union Influence

The frequency of general strikes in Western Europe has increased since the 1980s (Gall, 2012; Lindvall, 2013). Within the EU 15 plus Norway, 19 general strikes occurred in the 1980s, 36 in the 1990s, 39 in the 2000s, and 63 between 2010 and 2016 alone (Hamann et al., 2013a). Unions launch general strikes against government retrenchment reforms in five areas: (1) pensions; (2) non-pension social insurance (unemployment, disability and sickness insurance); (3) labor law (collective bargaining rights, laws regulating dismissals); (4) national wage issues (minimum wage, regulations governing overtime pay, national pay freezes); and (5) discretionary economic policy (reforms that enable immediate changes in the federal budget, such as expenditure cuts to education, infrastructure, and tax increases) (Hamann et al., 2013b).¹ Thus, general strikes constitute part of unions’ repertoire of collective action (see Ibsen and Tapia, 2017). Existing research shows that governmental policy reforms, or planned reforms, are a necessary condition for general strikes. Yet, not all reforms that unions oppose lead to general strikes. General strikes are used strategically to mobilize large numbers of people in protest against government reforms, and union leaders’ decisions to call such a strike are conditioned by numerous factors, such as union inclusion in or exclusion from negotiating the reform, the strength and cohesion of the government, but also union strength, or the nature of the issue (e.g. González Begega and Luque Balbona, 2014; Hamann et al., 2013b; Lindvall, 2013). Unions can call general strikes when a policy proposal first emerges; when negotiations between the government and the unions break down; or even after a policy has been passed. For example, union leadership decided to call the 2010 general strike in Spain after the UGT secretary general declared the negotiations with the government about a labor market reform a “fruitless dialogue” (Barnetson, 2010). In contrast, the 2002 general strike in Spain occurred a week after the conservative government passed its unemployment benefits reform by decree; in response to the strike, the government then reversed most of the policy changes (Hamann, 2012: ch. 7). Thus, whether or not a general strike occurs depends on complex decisions involving union leadership, unions’ organizational structures (e.g. whether a general strike requires a membership vote), interactions with governments, and other factors. Here, we build on the scholarship analyzing the causes of general strikes and move to the consequences of general strikes.

Governments have reason to care about general strikes: they can mobilize hundreds of thousands of participants, are highly visible, and tend to be economically costly. Multiple industries lose thousands of working hours, in some cases shutting down completely. Unlike work-based strikes directed against employers, general strikes mobilize support beyond union members. This is because the issues targeted tend to affect large segments of the public beyond labor market “insiders” with stable employment, who are most represented in workplace bargaining (Davidsson and Emmenegger, 2013; Rueda, 2005; Tepe and Vanhuyse, 2013).

General strikes are a form of protest, and hence a tool for citizens to voice their concerns publicly and garner the attention of the media (Barranco and Molina, 2019: 5). Protests are “designed to unleash a public debate, to draw the attention of the public to the grievances of the actors in question, to create controversy where there was none, and to obtain support of the public for the actors’ concerns” (Kriesi, 2012: 520). Thus, general strikes heighten the public’s awareness of salient welfare, economic, and social policy reforms. They can focus the public’s attention on particular policy issues, affect the perceptions of non-unionized citizens, assist in building coalitions with other civil society associations, and assign blame to the government for attempting to implement unpopular reforms (see Barranco and Molina, 2019: 4). General strikes target incumbents as responsible for poor policy decisions, and thus have the potential to accentuate public dissatisfaction with the government. Protests also send signals about public opinion preferences to policymakers that affect their beliefs and political decision-making (Wouters and Walgrave, 2017).

There is evidence that governments may attempt to mitigate these political and economic costs by meeting some of the union demands that motivated the strike. Governments offered concessions after 44% of strikes during the economically tumultuous 2000s (Hamann et al., 2013a). In some cases, governments attempted to thwart strikes entirely by modifying reforms even before a strike occurred (Hamann et al., 2013a). Governments make complex and strategic decisions about whether, and how, to respond to general strikes. In Spain, concessions have been the exception, as Table 2 evinces. Even when a general strike fails to change government policy, it can shape citizens’ attitudes by shifting responsibility for economic and social distress to the government (Molina and Barranco, 2016: 391). Comparative research also indicates that general strikes may impact governments’ electoral performance, especially if they occur close to an election (Hamann et al., 2016). Yet, extant research has not examined whether strikes have a differential impact on left compared to right governments. We do so by investigating the effects of general strikes on public opinion of the incumbent government, paying particular attention to strikes’ potential partisan impact. Based on the delinking literature, we posit that the partisan effects of general strikes may be uneven.

Although general strikes have occurred against governments of both the right and the left, there is reason to expect that they affect the public’s evaluation of left governments more detrimentally than of governments of the right. As parties of business and small government, right parties champion the neoliberal reforms that general strikes target. Policies that aim to cut government expenditure align with the ideological underpinnings of parties of the right and likely resonate with their constituencies. Indeed, Giger and Nelson (2011) find that in contrast to left governments, religious and liberal ones may gain votes after implementing austerity, which enables them to “claim credit” for social policy retrenchment. Consequently, supporters of right parties, and perhaps the public more broadly, may be less critical of right governments that pursue (strike-provoking) reforms than they are of leftist ones.

In contrast, the pursuit of such reforms betrays left parties’ historical commitment to social democratic principles. Moreover, because left parties’ constituencies tend to depend more on welfare state support than those of right parties, welfare retrenchment is likely to have a disproportionately negative impact on supporters of left parties compared to right parties’ more affluent constituencies. Furthermore, left parties have historically had closer ties to unions than right parties have. Therefore, unions’ willingness to call a general strike against a leftist government may also signal to the public, and specifically to the left’s own constituents, the ideological and political gravity of their (proposed) reform(s). Thus, general strikes lodged against left governments may invoke a double political backlash: the left-leaning public turns against the leftist government both for deviating from its traditional political platforms and for introducing reforms that disproportionately harm them. Consequently, we hypothesize that general strikes are more effective in moving public opinion against left governments compared to right ones.

However, the literature suggests alternative hypotheses that general strikes may not have differential consequences depending on the ideology of the government. General strikes may effectively turn public opinion against both left and right governments, affecting them equally. This expectation is consistent with the welfare retrenchment literature (see Kriesi, 2012; Pierson, 1996). As welfare states and social policies become embedded, they create a core constituency that is resistant to their retrenchment, regardless of who initiates reforms. Accordingly, any government would encounter public ire if it attempts to roll back popular universalist policies (Green-Pedersen, 2002; Zohlnhöfer, 2007). Alternatively, general strikes may have no effect on either left or right executives because unions are unable to focus the public’s attention or assign blame to the government, or are too organizationally weak to wage an effective general strike, and sway public opinion echoing the wider literature documenting union decline (see Wallerstein and Western, 2000).

The Case for Studying Spain

We chose Spain to examine the public opinion penalties of general strikes for left governments for three reasons: Spain exemplifies left party/labor delinking; the executive is easily assigned responsibility for policies; and only two parties governed, alone, between 1982 and 2020.

First, during the transition to and early years of Spanish democracy, ties between unions and leftist parties centered on ideological proximity. The Socialist Party (PSOE) formed a long-standing alliance with the UGT (General Workers Union), Spain’s major socialist union confederation. A communist alliance between the Communist Party (PCE) and the Workers’ Commissions (CC.OO.) emerged during the later years of the Franco dictatorship. However, the previously close relationship to leftist parties became considerably more distant beginning in the 1980s when the PSOE, under the leadership of Prime Minister González, moved the party toward the center as Spain prepared for EU membership.

The PSOE’s pursuit of supply-side policies and economic modernization led to the much-discussed “divorce” of the two members of Spain’s “Socialist family” in the latter half of the 1980s. The delinking process followed González’s implementation of industrial restructuring (downsizing the unprofitable manufacturing and mining sectors, while deepening Spain’s specializations in tourism, property development, and construction), selective privatizations, tight fiscal policies, and a series of controversial labor market reforms, particularly liberalizing temporary employment contracts, which provoked significant rebuke from unions (Gillespie, 1990; López and Rodríguez, 2011; Pérez, 2000). While the PSOE government certainly diverged from traditional Keynesian countercyclical demand management, its “leftist version of supply-side oriented policies” included public investment in education, health, pensions, and infrastructure and resulted in reduced inequality while leaving the institutional bases of organized labor intact (Boix, 1998; Hamann, 2012: ch. 5). Yet, unemployment remained high (consistently above 16% and the highest in the European Union), new jobs tended to be temporary, and union influence in the PSOE party and government eroded.

While the government attempted to negotiate some of these reforms with the unions, it imposed others unilaterally or after failed negotiations, through legislative action. During this time, the CC.OO. also became more independent from the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) and then the United Left (IU), as party and union leaderships diverged on political goals and strategies in the face of the PCE’s poor performance in the 1982 and 1986 elections. However, the relationship never became as openly antagonistic as that of its socialist counterparts. Because the 1988 strike failed to result in clear policy concessions by the PSOE government, UGT refused to support the PSOE in the 1989 elections. In turn, in 1990 the PSOE removed the requirement that its party members be registered with a trade union, thus severing the formal organizational links between the PSOE and the UGT. Some UGT leaders who also served in the PSOE leadership chose to relinquish their parliamentary seat and party position; others sided with the party and moved out of leadership positions in the UGT (Hamann, 2012: ch. 6). The UGT’s role in organizing the general strikes thus had broad significance and underscored the growing delinking process. The UGT felt marginalized by the PSOE’s move toward the center and increasing exclusion from the policy-making process in the face of mounting unemployment and a growing number of temporary contracts. Union influence in the debate surrounding contracts was also limited due to the dominance of market-led conservative narratives, even during PSOE administrations (Fernández Rodríguez and Martínez Lucio, 2012).

The 1988 strike further weakened union members’ electoral support for the PSOE (Gunther et al., 2004: 270–5) as union members had become more marginal as an electoral block for the left.² Despite the PSOE’s centrist policies and the delinking processes, it continued to be the major party left-of-center. As union-party ties weakened, the unions’ relationships with the political parties became more pragmatic. Both UGT and CC.OO. engaged in national-level agreements (social pacts) with the PSOE and PP governments (and at times with the employers’ organizations), especially during minority governments, although social pacts have largely disappeared since the early 2000s.

Unions also waged general strikes against subsequent PSOE and PP executives, especially when governments did not involve unions in welfare and economic reform efforts (González Begega and Luque Balbona, 2014; Hamann and Kelly, 2011). Still, general strikes are costly events for unions and workers, and union leaders have used them selectively as a protest strategy against governments. Unions have called general strikes more frequently against the PSOE, which faced five of Spain’s nine general strikes between 1980 and 2016, and the only strike threat (see Table 1).

Table 1.

General Strikes and Strike Threats in Spain, 1980–2016.

Date	Issue	Governing party	Government type	Unions	Policy concessions from government
20 June 1985	Welfare and Pension reform	PSOE	Majority	CC.OO.	No
14 December 1988	Labor market reform	PSOE	Majority	UGT, CC.OO.	Yes
28 May 1992	Unemployment benefits	PSOE	Minority	UGT, CC.OO.	No
October 1992 (Threat)	Unemployment benefits	PSOE	Minority	UGT, CC.OO.	N/A
27 January 1994	Labor market reform	PSOE	Minority	UGT, CC.OO.	No
20 June 2002	Labor market reform	PP	Majority	UGT, CC.OO.	Yes
10 April 2003	Iraq War	PP	Majority	UGT	No
29 September 2010	Labor market reform	PSOE	Minority	UGT, CC.OO.	No
29 March 2012	Labor market reform	PP	Majority	UGT, CC.OO.	No
14 November 2012	Austerity policies	PP	Majority	UGT, CC.OO.	No

PSOE: socialist party; CCOO: worker’s commission; UGT: worker’s general union; PP: popular party.

Second, Spain has comparatively clear lines of responsibility, pointing to the party leading the government for policies. This allows us to better distill the effects of general strikes on public opinion. Spain only had single-party majority or minority governments from 1977 until early 2020 (Field, 2016), unlike other high-strike European countries such as Belgium and Italy, where coalitions are commonplace and hence blame allocation is more difficult. Single-party governments in Spain facilitate blame attribution, in line with the “clarity of responsibility” logic (e.g. Duch and Stevenson, 2008). Further limiting the government’s capacity to defuse or avoid policy responsibility, Spain’s parliamentary system has few significant institutional veto players at the national level. While Spain has a constitutional court with judicial review (as in much of Western Europe), it does not have a popularly elected head of state. Spain’s governments, and the prime minister in particular, have strong agenda setting and control powers vis-à-vis a parliament that is asymmetrically bicameral—the lower house (the Congress of Deputies) holds substantially greater policy-making power than the upper house (Senate).³ Consequently, one might expect Spain to be a country where general strikes would generate public opinion penalties for all governments, regardless of the party in power. Therefore, if there are disparate partisan consequences, we can be more confident that left parties in government are particularly prone to public opinion penalties when they face a general strike.

Third, between 1982 and 2020, only two parties rotated in government—the center-left Socialist Party (PSOE) and the conservative Popular Party (PP), allowing us to hold constant the parties’ identities in the left-right ideological spheres. Finally, general strikes occur regularly in Spain but not frequently enough to cause protest fatigue, as could occur in countries such as Greece, which could dampen strikes’ public opinion effects. In the next section, we test empirically how general strikes affect public support for PSOE and PP governments.

Empirical Assessment of General Strikes and Public Opinion Costs

We rely on public opinion polling to assess the effects of general strikes on views of government performance and voting intentions.⁴ Some research finds that general strikes inflict electoral costs upon incumbents (Hamann et al., 2016); yet analyzing the partisan effect of strikes on public opinion rather than electoral outcomes is advantageous for two reasons. First, focusing on public opinion allows us to measure strikes’ impact on the public’s views more directly than changes in aggregate vote shares, which only change in election years (as we show below, changes in incumbent vote shares across elections closely follows trends in public opinion within our sample). Second, public opinion polling occurs on a more frequent basis than elections, allowing us to better track immediate public reaction to strikes than multi-year election cycles. At election time, governments may have responded to the grievances general strikes raised, and consequently may have had time to regain voter support. Similarly, other events may occur between the general strike and the election, boosting or diminishing support for the incumbent government.

Public opinion also matters in its own right. Public opinion polls can send important signals to the government, causing them to change their political and policy rhetoric (see Hager and Hilbig, 2020). Public opinion can also move parties’ ideological position (Adams et al., 2009). Reviewing an extensive body of literature on public opinion and public policy, Burstein (2013) finds that public opinion has a substantial impact on public policy, and that issue salience enhances this impact. Governments may thus use public opinion to devise strategies to increase their popularity before the next election, including policy adjustments.

Conceptualizing and Measuring Public Opinion

Public opinion data for our time series analysis are from quarterly and monthly surveys that Spain’s Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (CIS) conducts.⁵ CIS is the official polling organization of the Spanish government and polls representative national samples. For the questions we use, CIS conducted its opinion polls irregularly and on a monthly basis before 1995. Since 1995, however, CIS has polled consistently on a quarterly basis (every January, April, July, and October). Therefore, we select quarters, rather than months, for our time unit of analysis (we average monthly observations for the pre-1995 data into quarterly observations). Our dataset starts in the first quarter of 1986 and ends in the final quarter of 2015 (full details on data availability for our dependent and independent variables by quarter are provided in Supplemental Appendix A).

We selected two questions from the CIS survey as proxies for our dependent variable, public opinion of the government. The first question asks respondents which party they would vote for if a general election were held tomorrow (responses include the main political parties, another party, don’t know, won’t vote or blank vote⁶). In their online survey reports, CIS aggregates these responses, presenting the total proportion of responses for each party; hence, our unit of analysis is the poll aggregate and not each individual respondent. In line with this aggregation, the first dependent variable is the proportion of respondents who claimed they would vote for the party currently in power (results for Models I-III in Table 2). This variable is equal to intentions to vote for the PSOE in quarters when the PSOE is in office, and intentions to vote for the PP in quarters when the PP is in power. Voting intentions data are available in CIS surveys on a regular quarterly basis from the third quarter of 1993 onward (the sole missing data observation for this question is the second quarter of 1996—see Supplemental Appendix A for further details).

However, only having equivalent voting intentions data from 1993 onwards presents a problem for our analysis because between 1993 and 2015, the PSOE only governed in minority. Thus, it would be impossible to disentangle a partisan effect from a minority government effect since it is theoretically possible that strikes introduce greater or smaller public opinion penalties for minority governments. Therefore, we use a second public opinion proxy that CIS has collected regularly from 1986 onward and hence includes PSOE majority governments. This question asks how much confidence respondents have in the prime minister; responses include: a lot, quite a bit, little, none, or don’t know.⁷ Our second dependent variable is thus the proportion of total respondents who have “a lot” or “quite a bit” of confidence in the prime minister (results for Models IV-VI in Table 2). Polling data on confidence in the prime minister are available for every quarter from the first quarter of 1992 until the last quarter of 2015. Before 1992, this question was only asked for the polls conducted in the first quarter of 1986 and from the fourth quarter of 1987 to the second quarter of 1989 (see Supplemental Appendix A). Figure 1 presents time series for both dependent variables, which are highly correlated with each other, as well as the quarters that witnessed general strikes, which are marked by vertical black lines.

Table 2.

General Strikes, Partisanship, and Public Opinion.

	DV: Percent who would vote for incumbent party			DV: Confidence in the Prime Minister
	I	II	III	IV	V	VI
Strikes and partisan interaction
Strike occurred last quarter (1 = yes)	0.262	–0.212	0.263	1.147	0.637	1.158
	(0.800)	(0.904)	(0.795)	(0.334)	(0.711)	(0.345)
PSOE as incumbent (1 = yes)	–0.283	0.027	–0.623	0.231	0.359	–0.895
	(0.893)	(0.989)	(0.762)	(0.943)	(0.923)	(0.777)
PSOE * strike	–2.697**	–3.064	–2.742**	–4.107***	–3.570*	–5.896**
	(0.046)	(0.133)	(0.040)	(0.005)	(0.079)	(0.012)
Political variables
Seat share of ruling party	–0.618**	–0.553**		–0.275	–0.302
	(0.024)	(0.032)		(0.468)	(0.478)
Months since last election	–0.227***	–0.215***	–0.216***	–0.299***	–0.301***	–0.306***
	(0.000)	(0.000)	(0.000)	(0.004)	(0.006)	(0.004)
Social pact occurred last quarter (1 = yes)		–0.33			0.153
		(0.710)			(0.927)
PSOE * pact		–0.675			–0.42
		(0.582)			(0.834)
Minority government (1 = yes)			3.481*			2.812
			(0.058)			(0.357)
Minority * strike			Dropped			2.293
						(0.360)
Economic variables
Last quarter’s unemployment rate	–1.01***	–0.853***	–0.991***	–1.419***	–1.481***	–1.420***
	(0.000)	(0.000)	(0.000)	(0.000)	(0.000)	(0.000)
Last quarter’s inflation rate	0.072	0.041	0.073	0.074	0.038	0.085
	(0.800)	(0.898)	(0.802)	(0.862)	(0.932)	(0.842)
Last quarter’s real GDP growth rate	–1.998**	–1.2	–1.948**	–2.607***	–2.645***	–2.754**
	(0.023)	(0.238)	(0.027)	(0.002)	(0.002)	(0.011)
Reform severity proxies
Last quarter’s growth in government	0.626	0.880*	0.628	1.504**	1.479**	1.579***
Consumption	(0.146)	(0.067)	(0.153)	(0.017)	(0.023)	(0.008)
Last quarter’s (first difference) EPL index	2.919***	2.659***	2.947***	0.702	0.297	0.678
	(0.001)	(0.003)	(0.001)	(0.485)	(0.815)	(0.475)
Unilateral legislation occurred last		0.743			0.114
Quarter (1 = yes)		(0.565)			(0.938)
PSOE * unilateral legislation		–1.836			0.223
		(0.379)			(0.931)
Time trend	0.012	0.036	–0.015	–0.218***	–0.227***	–0.227***
	(0.767)	(0.450)	(0.668)	(0.000)	(0.000)	(0.000)
Constant	76.464***	68.229***	46.09***	95.201***	98.102***	81.454***
	(0.000)	(0.000)	(0.000)	(0.000)	(0.000)	(0.000)
Observations	81	77	81	93	89	93
R²	0.717	0.702	0.712	0.718	0.694	0.719
F-statistic	20.02***	15.71***	21.62***	34.80***	20.05***	36.28***

PSOE: socialist party; GDP: gross domestic product; EPL: Employment Protection Legislation.

Prais-Winsten GLS time series estimator with robust standard errors used.

P-values parenthesis. *, ** and *** indicate significance on a 90%, 95% and 99% confidence level.

Figure 1.

Opinion Polls on Voting Intentions and Prime Minister Performance (1986Q1 - 2015Q4).

Using quarterly public opinion data presents us with the opportunity to focus on strikes’ potential political costs to governments immediately after they happen. Moreover, public opinion competently tracks Spanish governments’ electoral fortunes. Figure 2 compares (percentage point) changes of intentions to vote for the incumbent government and confidence in the prime minister in public opinion polls taken immediately after the previous election and immediately before the current election with changes in incumbents’ popular vote share and seat share between elections. We are unable to compare these changes prior to 1996; polling data taken immediately before and after general elections only exists for the 1993 elections onward (thus, there is no base election year to which to compare the 1993 election—or other previous elections). For the 1996, 2000, 2004, and 2015 elections changes in our public opinion data are very close to the eventual vote and seat share that the incumbent government gained/lost. The decline (percentage point) of expressed confidence in Prime Minister Zapatero between the 2008 and 2011 general elections is much higher than the vote share and seat share that the PSOE eventually lost in 2011. Nonetheless, the decline of intentions to vote for the PSOE between the two elections closely aligns with PSOE’s loss in popular vote and seat share.

Figure 2.

Changes in Public Opinion and Vote/Seat Shares of Incumbent Governments in Spanish General Elections.

The 2008 general election poses an anomaly—intentions to vote for the PSOE and confidence in Prime Minister Zapatero significantly declined between the 2004 and 2008 elections, but the PSOE experienced a slight increase in their vote and seat share in 2008. However, we can attribute some of this drop in public opinion support to the fact that Zapatero’s government enjoyed exceptionally high popular support upon entering office in 2004. In the quarter after the 2004 elections, 45% of respondents indicated that they would vote for PSOE if an election were held tomorrow, the highest percentage within our time series, and roughly three standard deviations above the average voting intention for our sample. Zapatero himself enjoyed the confidence of over 66% of those polled, also the highest level of confidence in the prime minister for our entire time series, and three standard deviations above average (see also Figure 1 for these noticeably high levels). Given his (immediate) peak in popularity upon entering office, Zapatero’s decline in popularity between 2004 and 2008 was almost unavoidable. In sum, Figure 2 reveals that CIS public opinion data in Spain provides a good indication of how its executives will fare in elections.

Empirical Estimator and Model Specification

We select a (one quarter) ordinary least squares (OLS) distributive lag time series model as our estimator because quarterly polling data is collected in the first month of each quarter. In contrast, our quarterly economic and political (control) data are aggregated across a quarter’s total (three) months. Running a static model (where all variables are in the present period) would mean that some of our economic and political controls contain data for months after the public opinion polls were taken. Examining the influence of political and economic events within the last quarter on the current quarter’s polling data avoids this problem.⁸ Our baseline model is

\begin{array}{l} O p i n i o n_{t} = β_{0} + β_{1} (S t r i k e_{t - 1}) + β_{2} (L e f t_{t}) + β_{3} (S t r i k e_{t - 1} * L e f t_{t}) + β_{4} \sum X_{t - 1} \\ + β_{5} \sum Y_{t - 1} + β_{6} \sum Z_{t - 1} + ε \end{array}

$O p i n i o n_{t}$ is the manifestation of public opinion that we define above in quarter t. $S t r i k e_{t - 1}$ is a dummy variable that indicates whether a general strike occurred within the last quarter (1 if yes, 0 if no). $L e f t_{t}$ is a dummy variable indicating whether PSOE is the current ruling party of government (1 if yes, 0 if no), and $(S t r i k e_{t - 1} * L e f t)$ is an interaction between PSOE’s incumbency, and whether a strike happened last quarter. If strikes do not have partisan effects, and penalize both left and right governments equally, then only $β_{1}$ should be significant (and negative). If, on the other hand, strikes only introduce penalties for PSOE, as hypothesized above, then only $β_{3}$ should be significantly negative (in the event that strikes introduce popular opinion penalties for both PSOE and PP, but harsher penalties for PSOE, then both $β_{1}$ and $β_{3}$ should be significantly negative). Our results below include all strikes (and the 1992 strike threat) in the binary coding. However, we run our models excluding the Iraq War general strike, whose underlying dynamics were linked to foreign policy rather than welfare policies and thus differ from the other general strikes in our sample (Supplemental Appendix B),⁹ and the 1992 strike threat (Supplemental Appendix C), and our results are similar for all variables.¹⁰ General strikes data stem from Hamann et al. (2016) and incumbent vote share data are from Armingeon et al. (2017).

$\sum X_{t - 1}$ is a vector of political controls that includes the parliamentary seat share of the current incumbent at the previous election¹¹ and the number of months since the previous election. We anticipate that as governments settle into their tenure, their popularity will decline, reflecting a “negative incumbency bias” (Nannestad and Paldam, 2002). We also control for whether social pacts, which governments can use to blunt political blame associated with welfare reforms (Avdagic et al., 2011; Ebbinghaus and Hassel, 2000), occurred in the previous quarter (1 if yes, 0 if no). Similar to the general strikes dummy variable, we interact our pacts dummy with the PSOE incumbency dummy to determine whether social pacts exhibit partisan differences (i.e. whether social pacts affect popularity of the PSOE differently than they do for the PP). Social pact data stem from Hamann and Kelly (2011).

$\sum X_{t - 1}$ also includes an interaction term between whether a government is ruling in minority (1 if yes, 0 if no) and whether a strike happened in the previous quarter (included in Models III and VI in Table 2). The inclusion of this interaction effect allows us to control for strikes’ partisan effects that may be driven by government type (strikes may be more damaging to public opinion toward minority governments, relative to majority governments). As noted above, no PSOE government ruled in majority during the period covered by our voting intentions dependent variable; consequently, the minority government interaction term perfectly predicts whether PSOE was in power for this time series (this perfect collinearity problem is why the minority interaction term is dropped from Model III in Table 2). However, the confidence in the prime minister time series extends back into the 1980s, when PSOE governed in majority. Therefore, Model VI enables us to separate formally the minority government interaction with strikes from the partisan interaction. Because the minority government dummy is significantly correlated with the incumbent’s seat share, we exclude this control from Models III and VI.

$\sum Y_{t - 1}$ is a vector of economic controls, which enables us to control for whether the state of the economy features in public opinion toward an incumbent government. This includes the previous quarter’s unemployment rate, inflation, and the real gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate; quarterly data for all three variables is taken from the OECD (2016). Finally, $\sum Z_{t - 1}$ is a vector of controls that attempt to capture reform severity (in the previous quarter). Failing to control for reform severity poses a crucial omitted variable bias problem for our general strikes variable—it may not be the strike itself, but the reform it targets that causes a drop in government approval. Assessing and coding reform severity across policy areas is difficult. For example, it is challenging to compare the severity of the effects of cutting unemployment benefits to changes in the retirement age or other pension benefits. Reforms affect different population groups in different ways over different periods of time. To illustrate, changing the way pensions are calculated may not have an immediate effect on younger people but affects older people with much more urgency; changes to employment contracts and unemployment benefits may have immediate repercussions particularly for those outside of full-time permanent employment but may be less significant for those nearing retirement age and with stable contracts. Furthermore, Armingeon and Giger (2008) find that electoral punishment for governments that retrench the welfare state hinges on the coverage of the retrenchment by mass media, suggesting that it is not the reform itself but rather the way the reform is reported by mass media that drives electoral backlash. This supports our argument that general strikes are a tool to sway public opinion independently of the severity of the reform.

Nonetheless, we attempt to control for reform severity in three ways. First, because five of Spain’s total strikes were directed at labor market reform, we control for Spain’s (first difference¹²) Employment Protection Legislation (EPL) index (data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)—higher values for this index indicates that employment protection is more generous—hence positive/negative first differences indicate that employment protection is rising/falling). Since 1985, Spain’s EPL index has steadily decreased. Second, to control for public spending cuts, we control for (last quarter’s) growth rate in real general government consumption expenditure. Ideally, to measure the severity of welfare reform, we would control for changes in social benefits and social insurance generosity; however, these variables are not available on a quarterly basis. (Quarterly) government consumption expenditure (which includes “collective” consumption—public goods such as defense, justice, and infrastructure—and “individual” consumption—social transfers in-kind) can serve as a rudimentary proxy of public spending retrenchment, because if a reform impacts government spending in any way, some of its impact is likely to be absorbed in government consumption. Quarterly government consumption data is also taken from the OECD. Third, we attempt to control for reform severity with a dummy variable indicating whether government introduced a unilateral legislative reform to welfare, pensions, labor law or public spending cuts (1 if yes, 0 if no). Unions called general strikes in 6 of the 10 instances where Spanish governments introduced major welfare and labor market reforms during our time series. Similar to the strikes and social pacts dummies, we interact unilateral legislation with the PSOE incumbency dummy to determine if the public judges PSOE governments that introduce unilateral reforms more (or less) harshly than PP governments. We also executed regressions that controlled only for unilateral legislation events (and their interaction with PSOE’s incumbencies) where unions did not call strikes in their aftermath, in the effort to provide a “counterfactual” to instances of reform where strikes were not present to highlight their salience. Our results for strikes and its product term (as well as for the “strikeless” unilateral legislation dummy and its product term) remain unchanged (see full results in Supplemental Appendix D). Unilateral legislation data comes from Hamann and Kelly (2011).

Our baseline models for both of our dependent variables (Models I and IV) indicated the presence of first-order serial correlation (we did not find evidence of higher forms of serial correlation), while only the baseline model for expressed confidence in the Prime Minister suffered from heteroskedasticity. Consequently, we employ a Prais-Winsten estimator with robust standard errors. One of our dependent variables (voting intentions) failed to demonstrate stationarity, a central assumption of time series, while the other dependent variable (confidence in the prime minister) satisfies this assumption. To address possible spurious correlation driven by non-stationarity, as well as underlying time trends that may be driving public opinion, we incorporated a linear time trend into all our models.

Results

Table 2 presents our empirical results. Models I-III use the proportion of those intending to vote for the incumbent party as the dependent variable, while Models IV-VI use confidence in the prime minister as the dependent variable. Models I and IV serve as our baseline model. Models II and V incorporate social pacts and their interaction with the party of government, as well as the unilateral legislation dummy and its interaction with the party of the executive. We include these as separate controls from Models I and IV, because pacts and unilateral legislation data is only available until the end of 2012 (hence, quarterly observations in 2013, 2014 and 2015 are lost if both variables are added to our model). Models III and VI include the minority government dummy and its interaction with general strikes (the minority/strike interaction term drops in Model III because it perfectly predicts PSOE’s time in office. It does not drop in Model VI because this model includes data from the 1980s, when PSOE governed in majority).

Results in Table 2 suggest that strikes do not generate a public opinion penalty for incumbent governments in general; the strikes dummy on its own is not significant in any of the models. Rather, strikes’ impact on public opinion is conditioned on the PSOE being in power; strikes only display significance in its interaction with the PSOE dummy. From models I and III, a general strike (in the previous quarter) will cost a PSOE government roughly a 2.7% drop in the proportion of respondents who claim they would vote for the party at the next election (strikes’ interaction with PSOE’s incumbency falls just short of significance—p-value is 0.133—when social pacts and unilateral reforms are incorporated into the model, but this interaction term is significant if the Iraq War general strike is excluded; see Supplemental Appendix B). Models I-III also demonstrate that the partisan impact of strikes is not conditioned on the highly confrontational 1988 general strike as this strike is not in the sample because the data for the analysis starts in 1993. Strikes’ partisan effects also emerge in the perceived confidence in the prime minister models: from Models IV-VI, a general strike in the previous quarter reduces confidence in a PSOE prime minister by 3.5%–5.9%. Again, because the hierarchal strike dummy is not significant, PP prime ministers incur no loss in confidence after a general strike.

Our empirical results in Table 2 (and Supplemental Appendices B-D) indicate that left governments clearly incur a public opinion penalty. Regarding the other controls, all regressions substantiate the negative incumbency bias (except for Model II): as the months since the previous election increase, popular opinion toward the incumbent party declines. Incumbent seat share is significantly associated with reduced intentions to vote for the current governing party, indicating that incumbent parties with more seats incur greater drops in public opinion than those with fewer seats. This effect is also revealed in the minority government dummy in Model III—intentions to vote for minority governments are higher than majority governments. This result may reflect the fact that minority governments must be more consensus-seeking than single-party majority governments, as their capacity to pass legislation requires it. (Last quarter’s) unemployment rate has a negative impact on public opinion, in line with findings of the economic voting literature. (Last quarter’s) real GDP growth, surprisingly, also has a significant negative effect on intentions to vote for the incumbent party.¹³ Increases/decreases in government consumption expenditure are associated with greater/lower confidence in the Prime Minister, as expected, but do not demonstrate a significant relationship with voting intentions in Models I and III (in Model II, rising/falling government consumption is associated with increased/decreased intentions to vote for the incumbent, as expected). In contrast, increases/decreases in EPL generosity lead to higher/lower voting intentions for the incumbent government, but does not affect confidence in the Prime Minister. Finally, inflation, social pacts and unilateral legislation (whether they happen under a PP or PSOE government) do not significantly move voting intentions or confidence in the prime minister.

In sum, analyses provide support for the hypothesis that left governments suffer greater public opinion penalties than right governments. In addition to our quantitative analysis, we also conducted semi-structured interviews with four former Socialist Party labor ministers to understand their perceptions of general strikes. The interviews substantiate our statistical findings. While recognizing the organizational weakness of the unions and the difficulty of determining the electoral effects of general strikes, the interviews demonstrated ministers’ concern about the broader political costs of general strikes.¹⁴ As one minister stated, general strikes are more problematic for PSOE governments because it is the Socialist electorate, in particular, “that is summoned” to strike, not the PP’s. According to another, “If it is a leftist party [in government], it is logical that it is going to worry you more than if it is a rightist party. Many of the electoral bases of a leftist party are also active members of unions.” “The unions can make many people lose confidence in you.”

Moreover, the interviews suggested that left governments recognize that a general strike can more easily delegitimize a left government’s policies. The electorate expects PSOE to defend working class interests above those of business. Thus, one minister asserted, the unions can claim that they are being betrayed “by their own.” Another explained that the impact of a general strike could be opaque. Referring to Spain’s 1988 general strike, he asserted that it had the greatest effect on public policy, but the government did not publicize the policy and behavioral changes that resulted.

Conclusion

Over the past four decades, scholars and policymakers have questioned the political power and relevance of unions. Yet despite their organizational decline, unions in Western Europe have been successful in using general strikes to blame the government for neoliberal policy proposals to reduce the welfare state (Hamann et al., 2016). Our analysis of the Spanish case, however, suggests a more nuanced finding: it matters who governs when the public evaluates governments in the wake of a general strike. Left governments appear to suffer the consequences of general strikes in terms of public opinion penalties. Right governments, however, do not.

While these findings enhance our understanding of the political consequences of general strikes, we acknowledge some limitations. For one, while we control for reform severity, we cannot be entirely certain that the effects of general strikes are not partly linked to the extent of the reforms itself. In addition, we do not have consistent, reliable data on the intensity of the general strikes themselves. Arguably, a general strike with a larger following might have a greater effect on public opinion. While the popularity of the general strikes in our sample varies, we think that including strikes that were perhaps less popular and intense is a conservative approach and strengthens our findings. Despite these limitations, we find that general strikes have disparate political effects on governments as they decrease public support for left governments, but not right ones. This finding suggests unions still have influence. It also provides additional evidence of a break between unions and the left as unions use a strategy that undermines the strength of their former allies, thus reinforcing the delinking process. At the same time, if public opinion support for leftist governments drops in the aftermath of a strike, governments may have the opportunity to correct their course prior to the next election.

In some ways, Spain stands out from other European countries as a most likely case for strikes being successful in turning public opinion against governments of both the left and the right. Unions directed general strikes against a clear target, a single-party left or right government, and Spanish governments could not easily engage in blame avoidance given the clarity of responsibility resulting from the country’s political institutions and single-party governments. Furthermore, broader public demonstrations, beyond union mobilization and work stoppages, also typically accompany general strikes in Spain (Fishman, 2012), which may increase their salience and, potentially, impact. Yet, we find partisan differences despite similar institutional and political contexts for both left- and right-leaning governments. Additional research could provide further insights into whether our results also hold elsewhere, particularly in institutional environments with less clarity of responsibility, or where party-union relationships are more or less close.

Finally, the results have broader implications. If unions negatively affect public opinion of leftist governments through general strikes, while governments of the right are immune, general strikes may potentially provide a relative electoral advantage to parties of the right. Unions can use general strikes to hold left governments to account. Yet, their lack of impact on the public’s opinion of right governments may leave the latter comparatively less constrained in their pursuit of market-oriented reforms. Thus, while general strikes may present a strategy for union renewal efforts even when immediate policy gains remain elusive, they may come at the expense of weakening unions’ traditional political allies. This suggests that the relationship between unions and leftist parties continue to be in a continues to be interdependent despite the delinking process; public approval of left governments still partially hinges on union support or defiance. For leftist parties in governments, unions can be an ally or a foe that can act as an opposition force driving down public support.

Thus, the unions’ capacity to inflict public opinion penalties on left governments suggests that unions may have a tool that allows them to retain some influence on left parties engaged in major policy reforms despite the union-party delinking processes. Yet, at the same time, unions have no such tool to influence governments of the right when such governments are not engaging with unions through social pacts. As unions’ organizational strength has decreased, and their political influence through social pacts has declined, the partisan effect of general strikes on public opinion is perhaps another indicator of weakening union strength.

Unions, then, may be facing tough choices because the outcomes of general strikes may well be ambivalent: while they may lead to policy concessions, they can also erode the electoral appeal of parties whose policy agendas are closer to unions, despite existing differences, than those of other major parties.

Supplemental Material

sj-txt-1-psx-10.1177_0032321721989926 – Supplemental material for A Strike against the Left: General Strikes and Public Opinion of Incumbent Governments in Spain

Supplemental material, sj-txt-1-psx-10.1177_0032321721989926 for A Strike against the Left: General Strikes and Public Opinion of Incumbent Governments in Spain by Alison Johnston, Kerstin Hamann and Bonnie N Field in Political Studies

Supplemental Material

sj-xlsx-1-psx-10.1177_0032321721989926 – Supplemental material for A Strike against the Left: General Strikes and Public Opinion of Incumbent Governments in Spain

Supplemental material, sj-xlsx-1-psx-10.1177_0032321721989926 for A Strike against the Left: General Strikes and Public Opinion of Incumbent Governments in Spain by Alison Johnston, Kerstin Hamann and Bonnie N Field in Political Studies

Footnotes

Appendix

Appendix D:

Results Controlling for Strikeless Unilateral Legislation

	DV: Percent who would vote for incumbent party	DV: Confidence in the Prime Minister
	I	II
Strikes and partisan interaction
Strike occurred last quarter (1=yes)	0.208	0.706
	(0.868)	(0.590)
PSOE as incumbent (1=yes)	–0.321	0.44
	(0.881)	(0.904)
PSOE * strike	–2.558	–3.847**
	(0.109)	(0.016)
Political Variables
Seat share of ruling party	–0.588**	–0.297
	(0.034)	(0.483)
Months since last election	–0.221***	–0.301***
	(0.000)	(0.006)
Social pact occurred last quarter (1=yes)	–0.176	0.138
	(0.841)	(0.934)
PSOE * pact	–0.644	–0.502
	(0.594)	(0.802)
Economic Variables
Last quarter’s unemployment rate	–0.932***	–1.471***
	(0.000)	(0.000)
Last quarter’s inflation rate	0.022	0.042
	(0.945)	(0.927)
Last quarter’s real GDP growth rate	–1.717	–2.6***
	(0.107)	(0.002)
Reform severity proxies
Last quarter’s growth in government consumption	0.745	1.466**
	(0.106)	(0.023)
Last quarter’s (first difference) EPL index	2.348**	0.269
	(0.013)	(0.833)
Strikeless unilateral legislation occurred last quarter (1=yes)	0.719	–0.218
	(0.454)	(0.868)
PSOE * strikeless unilateral legislation	–0.13	–0.406
	(0.937)	(0.788)
Time trend	0.026	–0.225***
	(0.604)	(0.000)
Constant	72.91***	94.603***
	(0.000)	(0.000)
Observations	77	89
R-squared	0.698	0.694
F-stat	12.925***	20.976***

Prais-Winsten GLS time series estimator with robust standard errors used. P-values in parentheses. *, ** and *** indicate significance on a 90%, 95% and 99% confidence level, respectively.

Acknowledgements

For helpful comments and feedback on previous versions of the manuscript, we thank Ryan Bakker, Robert Fishman, Sofía Pérez, and the anonymous reviewers.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Kerstin Hamann

Supplementary Information

Additional Supplementary Information may be found with the online version of this article. All supplemental files including data files are also available at .

Content

Appendix A: Description of Data.

Appendix B: Results Excluding the Iraq War General Strike.

Appendix C: Results Excluding the 1992 General Strike Threat.

Appendix D: Results Controlling for Strikeless Unilateral Legislation.

Notes

Author Biographies

Alison Johnston is an associate professor and the U.G. Dubach Chair in political science at Oregon State University. Her research interests include comparative and international political economy, comparative capitalism, union and welfare state politics, and European economic integration.

Kerstin Hamann is Pegasus Professor at the School of Politics, Security, and International Affairs at the University of Central Florida. Her research interests include West European politics, Spanish politics, organized labor, and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.

Bonnie N Field is Professor of Global Studies at Bentley University. Her research interests include governance in parliamentary regimes, political parties, legislative politics, and territorial politics.

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