Unions as Digital Trailblazers: How Digitalizing Voting Practices (Re)shape Membership and Participation

ABSTRACT

Unions are increasingly adopting digital tools, yet research often portrays them as lagging in the digital age. This article challenges that view by examining union agency in the digitalisation of voting. Drawing on qualitative interviews with union officials, digital consultants collaborating on developing digital union voting and 12 years of voting and bargaining data from 6 Danish unions, we use affordance theory to show how union leaders’ understanding of membership shapes which possibilities of digital voting systems they perceive and actualise, and which they leave dormant. We argue that digital voting is not merely a technical innovation but a political intervention that reshapes democratic practice, reconfigures union–member relations and redistributes power. Digitalisation enhances procedural democracy and creates openings for participation but also exposes tensions in how unions recognise membership diversity. We further argue that union members are not only participants in democratic procedures; their membership is constituted by these procedures.