Networks and Political Contention over Unemployment: A Comparison of Britain, Germany and Switzerland

This article focuses on networks that are built in the field of unemployment in three main European states: namely, Britain, Germany, and Switzerland. It analyzes channels of exchanges between political parties, trade unions, pressure groups, nongovernmental organizotions (NGOs), organizations of the unemployed, as well as main policy actors and institutions. The main aim is to compare cross-nationally the extent to which similar sets of actors in different national fields build different patterns of exchange, and the dynamic relationship between these patterns of exchange and unemployment-related mobilization. Networks variation is matched against cross-national differences of collective action. Networks, it is argued, are an additional and necessary dimension of any investigation of collective action.