In this study, I examine how domestic regimes mitigate pressure from economically competing states to reduce the protection of labor rights. I argue that democratic states provide higher protection and are more resistant to this downward policy pressure for two main reasons. Directly, democracy empowers workers through freedom of association and enfranchisement. Indirectly, democracy offers better protection of property rights, which lessens the need to use labor rights as an economic incentive. I also argue that this resistance to the downward pressure is more pronounced in practice than in law. These expectations are supported through spatial analyses of a new global dataset on association and collective-bargaining rights for the period 1994–2012. The results remain robust to alternative measures of labor rights, different model specifications, and various econometric estimators.
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