Welfare States, Political Opportunities, and the Claim-Making in the Field of Unemployment Politics

The idea that the political context sets the parameters within which political participation and mobilization occur is quite common among scholars of collective action, but it has found only limited space among scholars dealing with the political activities of the unemployed. In this chapter, we assess the extent to which objects, positions, and forms of political claim making in the field of unemployment depend upon institutional approaches to unemployment. Our point of departure is represented by work on the impact of configurations of citizenship, political opportunities, and claim making in the political field of immigration and ethnic relations (Giugni and Passy 2004, 2006; Koopmans et al. 2005), and, more particularly, on first attempts to apply this latter type of work to the unemployment field (Berclaz and Giugni 2005; Berclaz et al. 2004; Giugni et al. 2009). More precisely, we deal with two main dimensions of the political context. We gathered data from the analysis of a large number of political indicators so as to examine the role of unemployment regulations and that of labor market regulations. Different combinations of these two dimensions are then identified so as to discuss the potential impact of specific institutional configurations of opportunities within the unemployment field. We also focus on more general opportunities relating to the institutional setup of a country when dealing with variations of forms of action, since mobilization in the unemployment field may well respond to more general stimuli that exist beyond this specific field.