This paper examines the union effect on vote choice and turnout in presidential elections from 1960 to 1988. It shows that union household status had a significant effect on vote choice in the last four presidential elections, including the widely reported debacle of 1984. Declining membership and other political-economic factors may explain organized labor's apparent political weakness, but these explanations have very different implications for our thinking about labor politics than the argument that leaders have diminishing impact on members' voting decisions. Surprisingly, union status does not have a significant impact on tumout; Verba, Nie, and Kim's "group-based political mobilization" hypothesis does not hold up well in the American context.

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Converging on competitiveness Whether``competitiveness'' is a``dangerous obsession'' (Krugman, 1994) is an open question, but it is an obsession in contemporary political discourse. The concept is so much in play that it is parodied in Dilbert cartoons and trumpeted in the halls of Congress, where nearly all things are said to enhance``our competitiveness in the global economy'' or``diminish our ability to compete in world markets''. Scientists concerned about research and development, farmers concerned about erosion, aerospace firms seeking to create defense monopolies, advocates of deregulation, tort reform, health care reform, the telecommunications bill, bilingual education, Englishonly schooling, transportation spending, the`information superhighway', and the space station, budget hawks, budget doves, and many others have stressed the significance of their projects to the great struggle for national competitiveness. Even the intelligence community has joined the fightöthe New York Times reports that the CIA may be remade as an``economic spy'' charged with advancing US interests in the competitiveness struggle. Why have competitiveness and the global economy become so important in contemporary policy discourse? And with what consequences? In this paper I explore these questions, building upon Krugman's``Competitiveness: the dangerous obsession'' (1996, page 119), first published in Foreign Affairs in 1994. There, and in related works, Krugman attacked the emergent conventional wisdom about the global economy as``pop internationalism'', and disparaged the belief that the maintenance of national competitiveness is a fundamental economic problem. He argued that from an economic perspective``concerns about competitiveness are ... completely unfounded'', and explored reasons for the power of the competitiveness idea and some consequences of its emergence. Krugman's project is to expose weaknesses in the economic arguments offered by unscrupulous or unschooled`policy entrepreneurs'. In this paper I am agnostic about these economic debates, working from the assumption that, within reason, the quality of economic arguments is irrelevant in the political process. I accept as inescapable what Krugman laments: the emergence of globalization