Industrial Concentration, Country Size, and Trade Union Membership

In his article, “Union Organization in Advanced Industrial Democracies” in the June 1989 issue of the Review , Michael Wallerstein advocated a model to account for cross-national differences in trade union organization rates. He argued that the size of the labor force provided the most important determinant of variation in union density. In this controversy, John Stephens takes issue with the operationalization of a key variable in Wallerstein's model—industrial infrastructure. Stephens reanalyzes the data using an alternative measure of this variable. His reanalysis supports his claim that in fact, the two variables yield results that are statistically indistinguishable. Wallerstein responds.