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This article examines the academic debate over union democracy and compares it with recent research on union renewal in the United States. The juxtaposition reveals that revitalization in US unions has not happened in the ways assumed in the literature on union democracy. Rather than being largely a bottom-up process, revitalization has contained a strong element of centralism and coordination. I suggest that union democracy has too often been framed in singular terms, as only involving the curbing of the illegitimate accumulation of power by union leaders. Yet a key problem faced by unions today — how they might best aggregate the interests of diverse workers and represent new constituencies — is also fundamentally a democratic concern, one that can be addressed only by broadening our understanding of union democracy.

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