How Unions Bring About Policy Implementation: Education Reform, Teachers’ Unions, and Subnational Politics in Mexico

Abstract

Many new policies remain unimplemented, facing opposition from the very individuals tasked with making them a reality. In contrast to the standard expectation that blocking is most likely when implementers are organized, this dissertation shows that, for policies that require mass compliance, cooperation between organizations and the government is necessary for successful policy implementation. I study when and how organizations cooperate in the context of an education reform (initially opposed by teachers and teachers' unions) in Mexico. I argue that cooperation is a function of two aspects of the organizations that represent those opposed implementers: (1) the degree to which they are fragmented and (2) whether they oppose the policy's goals. Specifically, the degree of fragmentation determines the likelihood with which the government will seek cooperation; a monopoly organization (the only one in a territory) has the collective action capacity needed to force governments into offering it inducements in exchange for its cooperation. It also has the incentive to protect all implementers, its members, from facing consequences as a result of implementation. Not all monopoly organizations will accept the offered inducements, however. While inducements are unlikely to effectively compensate opposition to the policy's goals, they can overcome opposition to the specific policy instruments used. Thus, I expect that successful implementation is most likely in places where a monopoly organization only opposes those instruments. The evidence in this dissertation draws on a combination of qualitative and quantitative data from Mexican states. Principally, I rely on 172 elite interviews, mainly with state- and federal-level bureaucrats, elected officials, and union leaders tasked with the reform's implementation. These interviews serve as the backbone for in-depth case studies of the implementation process in three states (Coahuila, Oaxaca, and Puebla), each of which illustrates one of the paths in the argument. I complement the case studies with a quantitative analysis, based on innovative measures constructed from a combination of administrative data and local news coverage from across Mexico's states. This dissertation contributes to our understanding how and when policies, like education reforms, that face opposition from the very actors whose compliance is necessary, are implemented. In doing so, I show, both theoretically and empirically, that cooperation is possible, even in unexpected circumstances. The conditions that make cooperation both surprising and necessary are common in many aspects of public service provision, including policing and healthcare, where variation in implementation has dramatic effects on citizen's quality of life and perceptions of the state.