Ever since Lipset, Trow and Coleman’s, Union Democracy (1956), the mechanics of democratic trade unionism have been a beguiling subject for labor academics. Much of the work, like Edelstein and Warner’s Comparative Union Democracy (1979), focused on organizational theory. The classic theorists of modern institutions (Fisher and McConnell, 1954; Michels, 1962; May, 1965; Jenkin, 1968; Parry, 1969) typically contrasted models of oligarchical and republican structures. McConnell (1966) went so far as to theorize that interest organizations — like unions — were examples of “private governments” and likely to be undemocratic in character.