In Mobilizing Restraint, Emmanuel Teitelbaum argues that, contrary to
conventional wisdom, democracies are better at managing industrial conflict than
authoritarian regimes. This is because democracies have two unique tools at
their disposal for managing worker protest: mutually beneficial union-party ties
and worker rights. By contrast, authoritarian governments have tended to repress
unions and to sever mutually beneficial ties to organized labor. Many of the
countries that fall between these two extremes-from those that have only the
trappings of democracy to those that have imperfectly implemented democratic
reforms-exert control over labor in the absence of overt repression but without
the robust organizational and institutional capacity enjoyed by full-fledged
democracies. Based