The Impact of Political Opportunity Structures on the Politicization of Civil Society Organizations in the Field of Unemployment and Precarity

Civil society organizations carry out a number of different actions: they may provide services, such as advisory or counseling activities, to their members or to a larger constituency; invest in educational and awarenessraising activities; organize social and cultural events; raise funds to ensure their survival; and so on. However, they can also engage in political activities. By “politicization”, here, we refer to the variable recourse of organizations to political activities: the more an organization engages in them, the more it becomes politicized. At the same time, political activities can take various forms, ranging from moderate and “hidden” forms, such as lobbying and representing interests, to more radical and disruptive forms, such as protest and direct action. Most crucially for this chapter, the political activities of civil society organizations do not occur in a vacuum; rather, they are likely to be strongly influenced by certain features of the context in which they are active.