Local Union Officers' Donations to a Political Action Committee
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During the 1980s, unions in the United States significantly increased their political activity, partly as a strategic response to declining membership. An important aspect of this effort is contributing money to congressional and presidential candidates through political action committees (PACs). U.S. federal election campaign laws allow unions to raise PAC money from members on a strictly uoluntary basis. Elected local union officers may play an important part in union PAC fundraising, as they are a sizable cadre of potential donors and their donations may send powerful signais to rank-and-file to donate as well. This paper examines the PAC donations among a sample of elected local union officers of the United Steelworkers of America (USW). The descriptive results show significant variation in officers' PAC donations. Regression analyses show that union commitment is a significant predictor of PAC support as is location in a non-right-to-work state. The results have implications for promoting union PAC fundraising efforts, and hence the potential of U.S. unions to rely on political action as a strategy for resurgence.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".