Since the beginning of the millennium, the institutions of the European Union have intensified their political efforts to combat youth employment. Youth‐specific policy initiatives were launched after the financial and economic crisis of 2008, and the overall subsequent rise of unemployment rates among young people. In this article, we analyse and assess these developments on the basis of an analysis of European policy documents and interviews. Our conclusions are twofold. One, we argue that the Europe 2020 Strategy and its flagship initiatives devoted to youth do not constitute a new policy field or approach, but are rather the outcome of an incrementalist logic of policy development. Two, the European youth strategy is clearly committed to activation, and it pushes policy developments towards a minimalist policy approach of precarious protection. Both developments are explained by the actor constellations and path dependencies of the European policy arena.
The comprehensive and systematic study of collective action organizations (AOs) requires a new methodological approach that takes into account the rise of online sources as well as the new ways in which people interact and participate in politics. This article aims to present and situate in the related literature such an approach, which was recently created and applied in two European Commission funded research projects, LIVEWHAT and TransSOL, across nine and eight countries respectively. Moving beyond recent studies using online sources, our research used a hubs website based approach to study alternative action organizations (AAOs) in the LIVEWHAT project and transnational solidarity AOs in the TransSOL project. The hubs and subhubs websites that aggregate data on AOs in multiple regions were scraped to identify national samples that offer advanced coverage of the repertoire of AO activities, as defined by the teams. These nodal websites were used as sources, similar to the way in which newspapers are treated in protest event analysis. The article situates and compares the new action organization analysis approach against its foundational protest event, protest case, and political claims analyses, as well as other approaches offering data on online activism. It outlines its main features and the related data construction process, while showcasing its application in the two European Commission cross-national projects. Finally, its merits and limitations are discussed, including a reference to how it can be used as a foundation for a mixedmethods approach.
Civil society organisations have been engaged in solidarity practices in various issue areas, both within their countries and beyond. This paper is interested in analysing whether and to what extent civic initiatives and organisations are involved in transnational solidarity activities within Europe. Moreover, it wishes to identify those factors that seem to promote or inhibit the scope of transnational European activities. The paper compares the situation in two countries (Greece and Germany) on the basis of data on transnationally-oriented civic groups and organisations committed to organising solidarity activities in three fields of work (disabilities, unemployment and immigration of refugees). The analyses show that most solidarity organisations remain active primarily at the local and/or national level/s, and that only a minority of solidarity organisations are engaged in cross-national activities. European activities are associated with organisations maintaining a web of transnational partners and a more politicised mission. Moreover, formalisation and professionalisation seem to be conducive to transnational activism, as much as to global activism. These findings show that cross-national activism can develop at the grassroots level on the basis of a transnational organisational field that is not nec-C. Lahusen () •
Mobilization by the unemployed has traditionally been considered a highly improbable phenomenon. However, recent observations challenge such a supposition. Our article compares protest waves in France, Germany, and Italy, where the unemployed successfully organized themselves and acted on their own behalf for several months. We argue that mobilization of the unemployed-although it empirically proved to be a possibility-remains very fragile, particularly depending on beneficial "windows of opportunities." Our analysis is above all interested in deciphering macrostructural conditions and opportunity structures, arguing that the unemployed benefited from external developments causing changes in potential mobilizing resources, and brought about new allies and political entrepreneurs. At the same time, however, these opportunity structures were actively exploited and, at the same time, their opening was fostered by the mobilization itself.
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