One Hundred Years of Strike Statistics: Methodological and Theoretical Issues in Quantitative Strike Research

Abstract

This study reviews the two main streams of quantitative research on the determinants of aggregate strike activity over time and across countries: the economic approach and the organizational/political approach. Economists have demonstrated that strike activity is linked to the business cycle, and sociologists and political scientists have shown that it is linked in the longer term to workers' organizational capacity and political position in national power structures. The author, however, points out unresolved contradictions among the empirical findings, and a lack of integration between the economic and organizational/political approaches. Furthermore, he argues that scholars' almost exclusive reliance on official strike statistics, which convey only limited information, has prevented them from investigating some important basic questions about strikes, such as what causes strike “waves.”