Hypothesis Testing Research Paper- Workers' Control

[RedSonRising]

For my World Politics Class, I need to create a hypothesis on trends in State behavior. I would like to test a hypothesis based on workers' control of the means of production, along the lines of "The more control and/or influence workers' have over their workplace, the more/less/better/worse/more or less likely that ______." I want to get a broad range in the countries that I study, in order to examine the state of workers around the world, as well as prove a point using empiricism. Ideas I had were standard of living, likeliness of military conflict, overall happiness in polls, etc.

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

[MarxSchmarx]

Yeah i think overall happiness is logical, but personally I would be interested if there is a link between worker's control and quality of life indicators like longevity, vacation days, job security, hell even something like hectars of parks or commute time.

But, I suspect, there will be no real clear trend because workers control both diffuse and closely intertwined with other processes, like nominal worker's control (e.g., companies whose shares are owned by employees or small businesses) versus what we on the left think of as worker-controlled, such as a coop.

Nevertheless, you might want to look at different industrial regions in modern Japan, in particular companies that are still dominated by factories practicing "jiko-kanri" and factories where there is a rigid hierarchy like in the west might have surprising differences in, for example, measures like job satisfaction.

[BobKKKindle$]

I don't think doing workers control is a good idea. There are a very small number of case studies historically, and there is no country today where all or even most of the economy is based on workers control - the only place where any kind of democratic/decentralized management exists on a large scale is Argentina, and even there the number of workplaces that embody workers control is fairly small. There's also the problem of defining what workers control is. If you're doing a project that involves a scientific hypothesis and the use of empiricism then it would be good to have a hypothesis that allows you to use easily available quantitative evidence. One possibility that immediately comes to mind is the impact of market reform programs on life expectancy and living conditions, as there are loads of case studies you could look at - one country you'd obviously want to examine and evaluate in quite a lot of detail would be the Russian Federation in the 1990s, but if you decide to do that hypothesis I would also suggest looking at the process of water privatization in Bolivia, because there's also a lot of good material there. If that doesn't suit your taste, then you might go with something broader and more abstract, like the relationship between human happiness and the level of income inequality, or even just GDP/Capita - there's been a lot of research done in this area recently.

A good site for quantitative data is the UN, specifically the Millennium Development Goals Indicators site, which has loads of different variables for almost every country: http://mdgs.un.org/unsd/mdg/Default.aspx

[RedSonRising]

Those are really helpful ideas, thanks guys.