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INTERPERSONAL TRUST AND CONFIDENCE IN LABOR UNIONS: THE CASE OF SOUTH KOREA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 April 2020

Byunghwan Son Open the ORCID record for Byunghwan Son [Opens in a new window]
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Abstract

How do ordinary citizens view labor unions? The importance of public opinion about unions has rarely been highlighted in the contemporary literature on labor politics. Using five waves of the World Value Surveys on South Korea, this article suggests that public confidence in labor unions is significantly affected by individuals’ interpersonal trust, conditional on their perception of the political representation of labor. Unlike those with high levels of trust, low-trust individuals view unions as an agent seeking their exclusionary interests at the expense of the rest of the society. The difference between high- and low-trust individuals’ confidence in labor unions is more pronounced when a liberal, rather than a conservative, government is in power because of the public perception that labor interests are already well-represented by the liberal government and union functions are redundant in such a circumstances. The empirical findings are found robust to alternative theoretical arguments and empirical techniques.

Keywords

interpersonal trustlabor unionSouth Koreainstitutional confidencegovernment partisanship
Type
Article
Information
Journal of East Asian Studies , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , July 2020 , pp. 267 - 290
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Copyright
Copyright © East Asia Institute 2020

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