This paper investigates how integration policies and welfare state regimes have affected the socio-economic integration of immigrants, focusing on eight European countries: Germany, France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, Austria, and Belgium. It presents comparative data on integration policies and welfare states regimes. The expectations derived from this comparative policy analysis are tested with cross-national data on integration outcomes regarding labour market participation, spatial segregation, and incarceration. The results suggest that multicultural policies, which grant immigrants easy access to equal rights and do not provide strong incentives for host country language acquisition and interethnic contacts, when combined with a generous welfare state, have produced low levels of labour market participation, high levels of segregation, and a strong overrepresentation of immigrants among those convicted for criminal behaviour. Sweden, Belgium, and the Netherlands, which have combined multicultural policies with a strong welfare state, display relatively poor integration outcomes. Countries that either had more restrictive or assimilationist integration policies (Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France) or a relatively lean welfare state (the United Kingdom) have achieved better integration results. These differences are highly consistent across the three domains of integration that are examined, with the exception of segregation rates in the United Kingdom.

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Starting from a critique of protest event and political discourse analysis, we propose an extended methodological approach that has the quantitative rigor of event analysis but also retrieves the qualitative discursive elements of claims. Our political claims approach extends the sample of contentious actions beyond protest event analysis by coding institutional and civil society actors, and conventional and discursive action forms, in addition to protests by movement actors, This redefines the research object to acts of political claims making in a multi-organizational field. We use examples from a research project on mobilization about migration and ethnic relations in Britain and Germany to demonstrate the analytic gains that are possible with our approach. By situating protest and social movements, not just theoretically but also methodologically, in a wider context of political claims making, we are in a better position to follow the recent calls for more integrated approaches, which place protest within multi-organizational fields, link it to political opportunities and outcomes, and are sensitive to discursive messages.

This article argues that the decisive part of the interaction between social movements and political authorities is no longer the direct, physical confrontation between them in concrete locations, but the indirect, mediated encounters among contenders in the arena of the mass media public sphere. Authorities react to social movement activities if and as they are depicted in the mass media, and conversely movement activists become aware of political opportunities and constraints through the reactions (or non-reactions) that their actions provoke in the public sphere. The dynamics of this mediated interaction among political contenders can be analyzed as an evolutionary process. Of the great variety of attempts to mobilize public attention, only a few can be accommodated in the bounded media space. Three selection mechanisms-labelled here as "discursive opportunities"-can be identified that affect the diffusion chances of contentious messages: visibility (the extent to which a message is covered by the mass media), resonance (the extent to which others-allies, opponents, authorities, etc.-react to a message), and legitimacy (the degree to which such reactions are supportive). The argument is empirically illustrated by showing how the strategic repertoire of the German radical right evolved over the course of the 1990s as a result of the differential reactions that various strategies encountered in the mass media arena. As the work of Charles Tilly 1 has shown us, before the advent of the modern, democratic nation-state, interactions between protesters, authorities, and publics were mostly localized, immediate, and direct. People would gather at the premises of a merchant, a landowner, or the seat of a local authority, and make their demands audible and visible by way of chants, slogans, petitions, or direct action such as the seizure of grain or physical attack on the wrongdoer. The power-holders thus addressed would respond in equally immediate and direct ways, by having the local police or private strongmen disperse the protesters, receiving a delegation to hear and respond to their grievances, or by themselves addressing the crowd, to rebut criticism or perhaps to announce concessions. Usually, neither of the parties directly involved in

Abstract. We present a number of concepts and hypotheses concerning the impact of the political opportunity structure on the mobilisation pattern of new social movements in Western Europe. The hypotheses refer to the general level of mobilisation in a given country, the general forms and strategies of action employed, the system level at which mobilisation is typically oriented and the development of the level of mobilisation across time. The hypotheses are tested in a comparative analysis of France, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland. The analysis reveals countryspecific variations in the mobilisation patterns of new social movements, which are largely in line with the theoretical expectations and serve to confirm the relevance of the political process approach for the study of social movements.

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