The Contentious Politics of Unemployment in Europe: Welfare States and Political Opportunities

摘要

For decades, unemployment has been among the main problems facing Europe. Not only is unemployment a costly state of affairs for Europe's welfare states, it also cripples societies and of rising unemployment and welfare reform. In doing so the authors make a valid critique of the prevalent elite orientation in most policy network analyses which grants little space to bottom-up processes of inter-organisational interaction. A critique of this contribution is that the label 'organisations of the unemployed' is applied too generously and that the authors seem to attribute demonstrations and other forms of mobilisation to 'the unemployed' where trade unions and political parties were the real movers.