UNION DEMOCRACY, RADICAL LEADERSHIP, AND THE HEGEMONY OF CAPITAL*

Are democratic or authoritarian unions more effective in defending and advancing workers' interests? Generally, the answers given are untheoretical, agnostic, or impressionistic-and unsupported by systematic empirical studies. The theory guiding our analysis is that a union with a democratic constitution, institutionalized opposition, and an active membership would tend to constitute a worker's immediate political community and sustain both class solidarity and a sense of identity between members and their leaders. As a result, such democratic unions would also defy the hegemony of capital in the sphere of production. Consistent with this theory, a contingency analysis of a sample of contracts won by CIO unions from 1938 to 1955 shows that those contracts won by stable highly democratic unions were more likely to be pro-labor than were those won by stable moderately democratic or stable oligarchical unions. The contracts won by unions with organized factions also were far more likely to be pro-labor than were those won by unions with sporadic factions or no factions. This pattern held both among the unions in the Communist camp and those in shifting or anti-Communist camps. Further, OLS analysis shows that constitutional democracy, organizedfactions, and Communist leadership (which approached statistical significance) each had independent effects in limiting the power of capital in