Civil society in a postwar period: Labor in the Salvadoran democratic transition

Abstract

This research note seeks to offer some resolution to the theoretical disagreements over how democratization affects civil society, specifically in a transition toward democracy that occurs through pacted settlements of an armed internal conflict. Using a comparative study over time of the labor movement in El Salvador, the authors demonstrate that while unions of the political center and left have weakened since the signing of the Salvadoran Peace Accords, independent labor groups show higher levels of organizing and right-leaning unions have maintained nearly constant levels of organizing. But the labor movement has become atomized because unions have been unable to redefine their once-common political goals to adopt other unified stances in the postwar period. The data show that the unions that have relinquished excessively politicized stances or never claimed them are the ones that survive and sometimes grow in the postwar environment. These findings have implications for the nature of the emerging Salvadoran democracy and the economic well-being of its citizens.