Abstract
This volume, edited by Marco Giugni, combines some pressing issues of the recent – and presumably also the following – decades, namely unemployment, social exclusion and transnationalism. In contrast to prevailing political science approaches to unemployment, that mainly discuss the paradigm shift towards activation measures and flexible labour markets and/or compare different national paths, the approach selected here stands out insofar as it includes collective actors, in other words, groups that are confronted with, affected by or involved in these changes: state actors and parties, labour, employers and civil society organisations or organisations of the unemployed themselves. Its overall aim is to ‘propose a novel perspective on unemployment politics’ by examining ‘the relationships between political institutional approaches to employment policy and political conflicts mobilized by collective actors over unemployment’ (p. 3). So the question the underlying research project arises from is how institutional approaches to unemployment result in different opportunity structures and thus shape the actors’ scope.
In Chapter 1 Cinalli and Giugni attribute the various patterns of claim-making to the given national opportunity structures, namely regulations concerning unemployment and the labour market, as well as general polity features. The authors show that country-specific institutional contexts provide the specific opportunity structure shaping political claims, and that in terms of claim-making the unemployed may benefit from rigid labour markets. This result is striking because it seems to point in the opposite direction than the flexibilisation trend of the recent decades.
After the introductory chapter links the structure of political claims on unemployment in the six countries analysed to their respective political–institutional context, the subsequent contributions are no longer concerned with politics, but rather with different actors and forms of claim making that arise from or are undermined by these structures. The book’s main message can be summarised as follows. First, the publication does away with the widely held belief that the ‘economically weak and politically isolated’ (p. 45) unemployed cannot be mobilised, but at the same time makes clear that claims on unemployment or social exclusion are predominantly formulated by other groups (p. 230). Across the six European countries analysed, central state actors are by far the most dominant actors in the field (p. 30).
Second, it becomes clear that workers facing the risk of dismissal benefit from a strong institutional structure in comparison to those without work who are not represented by trade unions or similar institutions to the same extent (cf. Ch. 1, 2, 4, 6). However, with 17 percent of all claims, after the state unions are the second biggest claim makers on behalf of the unemployed (p. 104). Overall this marks a rather ambiguous relationship between trade unions and the unemployed.
Third, institutions matter (cf. Ch. 1, 4, 5, 6), not only in how they affect claim making in each of the six countries studied, but also in how they shape the union–unemployed relationships. Hence the book’s central statement is that prevailing contextual characteristics such as unemployment regulations, labour markets or general polity features, but also regional distribution of unemployment, impact on who claims how. In short, welfare states shape political opportunities. But rather than applying this structural argument to specific actors or units in each chapter, it would have been also interesting for the reader to further deepen the analysis of the contents of claims, especially when it comes to protests of the unemployed themselves.
Fourth, besides the fact that nation states remain without a doubt the crucial target of claims, Part III of the book as well as della Porta’s contribution make a strong point in saying that the EU is addressed as an additional actor, especially when issues ‘are perceived as no longer under the control of the nation state’ (p. 63). Statham and Cinalli specify this finding, saying that ‘the more debates include the European level, the more they are dominated by state actors’ at the expense of parties and civil society actors (p. 208). So weak actors become weaker and already powerful actors grow stronger under conditions of Europeanisation. This confirms the well-known democratic deficit of the Union. Consequently, the marches européennes that occurred, beginning in 1997, called for more Europe, a Europe that is receptive to social claims. Chabanet tries to explain these protests of the unemployed – a movement that has always been considered extremely unlikely. Although the original marches were organised by activists, the mass protests triggered an important ‘shift in the framing of unemployment’ and proofed the capacity of the socially weak for political action (pp. 232 ff.). The question of whether different paradigms of unemployment impinge on the dimensions of claim making seems crucial. Therefore it is a pity (but, of course, absolutely understandable given the neo-institutional perspective) that other authors do not follow up this link.
The trans-national perspective supplementing the national one is one of the book’s great strengths. It allows differences between the levels in terms of claim making and mobilisation to be examined, and enables the reader to contextualise the findings, which is usually not possible when the weak degree of mobilisation at the European level is mentioned. Although not all contributions achieve the overall aim ‘to examine the relationship between public claims, collective mobilisations, and policy decisions’ (p. 6) to the same extent, the book convinces through its coherent approach. Altogether the studies provide a number of inspiring and controversial results that pose new answers to questions that many perceive as already solved.