Cooperative Democracy and Political-Economic Development: The Civic Potential of Worker Coops

Worker Cooperatives have emerged as integral to political-economic development proposals in various jurisdictions across the U.S. in recent years. We connect these proposals to extant empirical research on the effect of participation in the workplace on conventional civic and political participation. And we suggest how commonalities in the work of Amartya Sen and Elinor Ostrom afford theoretical resources for designing and assessing such policy initiatives.