Organized Labor and Depression in Europe: Making Power Explicit in the Political Economy of Health

Abstract

Despite engagement with the construct of power relations, research on the political economy of health has largely overlooked organized labor as a determinant of well-being. Grounded in the theory of power resources, our study aims to fill this gap by investigating the link between country-level union density and mental health while accounting for the compositional effects of individual-level union membership. We use three waves of the European Social Survey (N = 52,737) and a variation on traditional random-effects models to estimate both the contextual and change effects of labor unions on depressive symptoms. We find that country-level union density is associated with fewer depressive symptoms and that this is true irrespective of union membership. We discuss our findings vis-à-vis the literatures on the political economy of health, power resources, and fundamental causes of disease.