James Piazza, De-Linking Labor: Labor Unions and Social Democratic Parties under Globalization," Party Politics, 7 (July 2001), 413-435.

First Paragraph:
There are two conventional wisdoms about the effects of globalization on domestic politics.' One holds that globalization undermines domestic actors because it substantially widens the opportunity for owners of mobile capital to relocate abroad and increases competition for domestically produced goods as consumers have greater access to foreign goods. In this scenario, globalization threatens to dramatically alter the economic, political and social relations (wage norms, economic regulations, social responsibilities) that domestic actors have painstakingly negotiated in the past 50 years in industrialized countries while constructing a 'buyer's market' for transnationally mobile actors. The other holds that globalization, on the contrary, has no measurable adverse effects on domestic actors or, in cases, may even enhance the importance of domestic actors and 'the local'. In this contrasting scenario, the insecurity that accompanies globalization heightens the importance of mediation by domestic agents of social, political and economic security.

Figures and Tables:
Figure 1: Union density and percentages of seats held by center-left parties in national legislatures p. 419
Table 1: Results p. 422

Last Paragraph:
These factors, excluding the decline of industrial employment, for which little significant evidence was found in the analysis, probably play some role in the policy shift of social democratic parties, which now increasingly peddle lower taxes, reduced social spending and free trade in an attempt to capture middle to upper-middle class votes. However, this study appends another precipitant: the fact that organized labor is not the electoral (or workplace) force it used to be.