Enos, Ryan DHernandez, Kiara A.2026-06-0920262026-06-052026Hernandez, Kiara A.. 2026. The Politics of Collective Action Within and Beyond the Workplace. Doctoral Dissertation, Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.32700903https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/42740264Long-run trends in wealth inequality and economic consolidation have generated substantial grievance amongst the mass public. This dissertation examines one form of collective political response: workers organizing into labor unions to demand better wages and working conditions from their employer. Such organizing requires workers to take costly collective action without knowing whether others will do the same. I thus approach this as a question about the micro-politics of cooperative processes. The first part of the dissertation examines the internal dynamics of these processes across two studies. The second part turns to downstream consequences, asking whether local exposure to labor action shapes the political behavior of surrounding residents. In both parts, I focus on retail, food service, and healthcare sectors in the United States, which employ an ethnoracially diverse workforce and have seen recent surges in organizing activity. The first two studies examine how ethnoracial diversity shapes support for collective action. In the first study, I draw on large-scale survey evidence from hourly workers in retail and food service, and novel administrative data from union organizing campaigns in the healthcare sector. Using the survey data, I find that greater perceived workplace diversity is associated with lower baseline union support. Using the administrative data, I reconstruct “contact groups”: the discrete sets of coworkers among whom routine contact might be expected to bridge intergroup divisions. I find instead that contact-group diversity predicts greater pre-election disagreement, driven by rising uncertainty rather than opposition to the union — a pattern I call fracture without failure. Bargaining-unit diversity in my sample is not consistently associated with closer election margins, suggesting micro-level friction does not translate into weaker aggregate outcomes. In the second study, I use an LLM-based cooperative experiment to identify the mechanisms through which diversity shapes willingness to engage in collective action. Participants are randomly assigned to ethnoracially homogeneous or heterogeneous three-person teams and deliberate via chat with two confederates advocating opposing bargaining strategies. Participants assigned to diverse teams are no less willing to cooperate but shift significantly toward the cautious partner— an effect not explained by co-ethnic preferences or mediated by interpersonal antipathy, and one that emerges through deliberation rather than exposure to demographic cues alone. Text analysis of deliberative content reveals that assignment to diverse teams increases participants’ use of language that invokes caution and hedging, consistent with a mechanism of strategic uncertainty rather than interpersonal bias. The results suggest that the barriers diversity poses to collective action may be better addressed by interventions that target coordination uncertainty than by those aimed at improving intergroup relations alone. The third study turns from the internal dynamics of collective action to its downstream political consequences. We study the 2021–2022 Saint Vincent Hospital nurses’ strike in Worcester, Massachusetts, the longest nurses’ strike in state history and a high-salience labor action that drew sustained elite endorsements, widespread media coverage, and a discrete service disruption that may have given nearby residents a direct stake in its outcome. Using the voter file and a difference-in-differences design comparing the 2018 and 2022 midterm elections, we examine whether nearby residents were more likely to vote, register to vote, and support a redistributive ballot measure. We find no association between residential proximity to the strike and turnout or ballot measure support among existing voters. New voter registrations within one mile of the hospital were higher in 2022 than 2018, increasing after the hospital cut back essential services. This pattern is more consistent with a feedback mechanism than with elite cue-taking, and suggests that strikes can draw new participants into the electorate even when they fail to mobilize existing voters. Together, these studies contribute new evidence on the micro-level conditions that shape collective action and its downstream political consequences, pointing to the hyper-local scale as a key site at which these dynamics unfold.application/pdfenCollective actionInequalityIntergroup relationsOrganized laborPolitical behaviorPolitical scienceThesis or Dissertation2026-06-090009-0003-6611-1475