Left Governments, General Strikes, and Public Opinion in Spain

The political links between unions and left parties in Western Europe have witnessed notable strain over the last four decades. While there is disagreement about the extent and severity of union-left party delinking, there is a growing acceptance that unions’ organizational weakness has curbed their political influence on left parties. In contrast, we argue that unions can still inflict political costs on left governments whose policies deviate from social democratic traditions through general strikes. We examine whether general strikes inflict differentiated public opinion penalties depending upon the ideology of the incumbent government. Employing a distributive lag, time-series analysis of quarterly public opinion data in Spain, we find that Spain’s major left party (PSOE) incurred significant public opinion penalties, both in terms of confidence in the prime minister and vote intentions, if a general strike occurred while it held power. In contrast, the right-leaning (PP) governments incurred no public opinion penalties for general strikes that occurred under their watch. Our results suggest that even in times of union-left party delinking and labor’s greater organizational weakness, unions are still able to put political pressure on leftist governments.