Networks and Political Contention over Unemployment: a Comparison of Britain, Germany and Switzerland
Résumé
This article focuses on networks that are built in the field of unemployment in three main European states: namely, Britain, Germany, and Switzerland. It analyzes channels of exchanges between political parties, trade unions, pressure groups, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), organizations of the unemployed, as well as main policy actors and institutions. The main aim is to compare cross-nationally the extent to which similar sets of actors in different national fields build different patterns of exchange, and the dynamic relationship between these patterns of exchange and unemployment-related mobilization. Networks variation is matched against cross-national differences of collective action. Networks, it is argued, are an additional and necessary dimension of any investigation of collective action.