Does Social Capital Sustain Trade Unions? Evidence Against the Social Custom Account from 34 OECD-Area Countries, 2008–2019

Replication package for the manuscript "Does Social Capital Sustain Trade Unions? Evidence Against the Social Custom Account from 34 OECD-Area Countries, 2008-2019". Social capital and trade union density correlate at 0.55 across 34 OECD-area countries observed annually from 2008 to 2019, but an indicator for union-administered unemployment insurance absorbs the association entirely and leaves the between-country term insignificant under every institutional control. Within countries no effect appears at the mean or anywhere in the conditional distribution: the design detects 0.23 density points per within-country standard deviation and rules out positive effects above 0.05 on that scale. The one significant coefficient is negative and traceable to the Swedish and Finnish unemployment-fund reforms. Separating the two margins and bounding the within estimate converts a non-finding into a refutation of the social custom account at the aggregate level. Deindustrialization and trade exposure account for most of the observed decline, so revitalization strategies built on rebuilding community trust address the wrong margin; the institutional link between membership and unemployment insurance is where policy has purchase. The archive contains sixteen files: a README documenting variable construction and known limitations, a build script that reconstructs the panel from the two raw source workbooks, a replication script covering every diagnostic, estimate, robustness check and figure, six Stata datasets, and the five manuscript figures. Requires Stata 17 or later, with xtcd2, pescadf, xtwest, xtscc, mmqreg and xtdolshm. The two source workbooks, the OECD/AIAS ICTWSS database version 2.0 and the Legatum Prosperity Index 2023, are not redistributed here because they remain subject to the terms of their original providers. The README records where each is obtained and which sheets are used. Results are specific to those releases, since both providers revise estimates between editions. Panel: 34 OECD-area countries, 2008 to 2019, strongly balanced, N = 408.