Teacher Unions, Political Machines, and the Thorny Politics of Education Reform in Latin America

• Date: 01 March 2022
• DOI: 10.1177/00323292211002788
• Published date: 01 March 2022
• Author: Ben Ross Schneider
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/00323292211002788

Politics & Society

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DOI: 10.1177/00323292211002788

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Article

Teacher Unions, Political

Machines, and the Thorny

Politics of Education Reform

in Latin America

Ben Ross Schneider

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Abstract

Existing research on developing countries emphasizes the decisive power of teacher

unions in education politics. Yet that power varies, and a full understanding of the roots

of union power and the sources of cross-national variation requires deeper analysis

of organizational dynamics within unions. This analysis supports four arguments. First,

teachers have a range of advantages in overcoming obstacles to collective action.

Second, unions are not all alike; they vary widely, from interest groups (in Chile,

Brazil, and Peru) to powerful political machines (in Mexico and Ecuador). Third, the

source of this variation lies in factors (e.g., influence over teacher hiring) that shift

power within unions from members to leaders in political-machine unions. Fourth,

analyzing the dimensions of variation helps explain the different outcomes of recent

reforms to teacher careers in Latin America, especially in highlighting the staunch

opposition from political-machine unions.

Keywords

education reform, teacher unions, clientelism, Latin America

1002788PASXXX10.1177/00323292211002788Politics & SocietySchneider

research-article2022

Corresponding Author:

Ben Ross Schneider, Department of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 30

Wadsworth Street E53-470, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA.

Email: brs@mit.edu

2022, Vol. 50(1) 84–116

In early 2013, Mexico’s newly inaugurated president, Enrique Peña Nieto, launched a

frontal assault on one of the world’s most powerful teacher unions. He started by

imprisoning its leader of more than twenty-five years, Elba Ester Gordillo, aka “la

Maestra,” on charges of embezzling from the union.1 Among other trappings of power,

the National Union of Workers in Education (SNTE, Sindicato Nacional de

Trabajadores de la Educación) had, by the 2000s, 1.4 million members (by compul-

sory membership); in addition, SNTE could claim 31,000 union organizers paid as

teachers, hundreds of members working in administrative positions in the education

bureaucracy (including at the highest levels of the Secretariat for Public Education or

SEP, Secretaria de Educación Pública), local control over hiring decisions, and in

some states even control over teacher payroll. And SNTE created an allied political

party that answered to Gordillo.2 However, this juggernaut was no mere “union” or

“interest group” but rather a muscular political machine. How can we compare SNTE

to the smaller, leaner teacher unions in Chile, Brazil, and elsewhere in Latin America

that looked more like garden-variety interest groups?

Teacher unions have been called many things—corporatist, clientelist, rent seeking,

and vested interests, usually bent on capturing government education agencies. Terry

Moe, who pretty much on his own among political scientists for years pushed research

on teacher unions, argues that they are vested interests and “by far the most powerful

groups in the American politics of education. No other groups are even in the same

ballpark.”3 And in their broader comparative analysis, Moe and Susanne Wiborg claim

that “the fact that its teachers unions are highly organized, politically very active, and

play central roles in the politics of education is likely to be an exceedingly common

fact of political life across all nations.”4

This article seeks to build on this pioneering work by elaborating further the special

power resources available to teacher unions, and especially their leaders, and uses that

elaboration to differentiate—conceptually, theoretically, and empirically—between

machine and interest-group unions. Interest-group unions are characterized by fewer

organizational resources, leadership that represents multiple political parties, and little

influence on electoral participation by teachers. Machine unions, in contrast, have

more organizational resources, generally ally with one political party, and have influ-

ence over how members engage in politics.

More broadly, recent research on the politics of education is curiously split between

work by those like Moe who think teacher unions are key to understanding education

politics and a much larger body of research on skill formation, inequality in education,

and patterns of education spending.5 Major recent books in the latter group make virtu-

ally no mention of teacher unions.6 These and other studies focus largely on coalitional

and party dynamics that give rise to different sorts of educational systems distin-

guished by such things as the share of vocational education or distribution of public

spending across levels of education (primary, secondary, and tertiary). By implication,

these arguments assume that governments translate voter and coalitional preferences

into policy outcomes with little friction.

To Moe and others,7 the policy process could not look more different. In their view,

education reformers face implacable opposition from teacher unions and have few if

85

Schneider

any social groups or political parties to back them up. A possible reason for the divide

in the literature is that the predominant focus of the parties and coalitions scholarship

is Europe (where parties and social coalitions are clearer and more coherent), whereas

those emphasizing teacher unions focus more on the United States and middle-income

countries where parties are weaker and social coalitions more fragmented.8

The focus here is Latin America and other middle-income countries where teacher

unions loom large in education politics. Teacher unions are immense (and usually the

biggest of all unions) and politically powerful across Latin America and in other large

middle-income countries, such as South Africa and Turkey, as well as in many lower-

income countries in South and Southeast Asia.9 Education International, a global con-

federation of teacher unions, claims to represent 30 million teachers.10

However, even among those highlighting union power in those contexts, few delve

deeply into the wide and consequential variation in their organization and connections

to politics.11 This article takes a deeper dive in order to establish empirically the

dimensions and range of cross-national variation among teacher unions and then

reconceptualize, on the basis of that empirical variation, what sorts of political actors

teacher unions are.12 The goal of the article is first conceptual—to offer a new analytic

framework for understanding teacher unions as political actors and to distinguish

between machine and interest-group unions. It then provides preliminary evidence on

two related hypotheses: (1) that the sources of variations among unions derive from

internal organizational factors that give leaders in machine unions leverage over mem-

bers, and (2) that machine unions are stauncher opponents of reforms to teacher careers

and less amenable to negotiating reform implementation with the government.

The predominant view in scholarship on teacher unions in the United States is a

pluralist one, namely, that unions express the aggregated interests of their members.13

Union leaders, as Moe puts it, “must be centrally concerned with pleasing their mem-

bers.”14 The alternative view this article develops is that teacher unions as organiza-

tions regularly gain prerogatives in hiring, teacher transfers, policy consultation, and

other organizational benefits (e.g., automatic dues checkoff, union staffers paid by the

government) that give union leaders both autonomy from, and leverage over, members

and thus give union leaders organizational interests of their own. Such prerogatives are

often just listed in previous scholarship as further evidence of union power. However,

they are crucially distinct: they shift power within union organizations from members

to leaders in ways that make teacher unions all the more valuable in politics because

union leaders can deliver votes, campaign legwork, and demonstrations. For compari-

son, in Peru members of the interest-group union Sutep (Sindicato Unitario de

Trabajadores en la Educación del Perú, Unitary Union of Education Workers of Peru)

split their votes among many candidates across the full political spectrum: left, right,

and center.15 Other unions, like SNTE (noted above), with leverage over personnel

actions, have more ways to get teachers to campaign and vote for candidates endorsed

by union leaders.16 In machine cases such as SNTE, inverting Moe, union members

must be centrally concerned with pleasing their leaders.

Teacher unions are increasingly at the heart of efforts to understand (and to plan)

the politics of reforms designed to improve the quality of education.17 Many things can

86 Politics & Society 50(1)