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Youth is a recurrent topic of public debates, particularly because youth features in almost all issue fields discussed in mass media, ranging from educational and cultural to criminal matters. However, previous research has highlighted that youth is not necessarily actively involved in raising its own voice within the public sphere, which gives cause for concerns about the representation of youth in public discourses and thus in democratic opinion formation. This article wishes to critically assess the proposition that young people are objects of public discourses rather than active participants. For this purpose, it will analyze public statements reported in newspapers of nine countries (Germany, France, Greece, Italy, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom). The analysis makes conceptual use of claims-making analysis and tries to identify contextual factors that determine the extent to which youth actors actively participate in public discourses. In particular, we wish to assess whether discursive inclusion or exclusion of youth is patterned along countries and/or policy fields. Our findings show that policy fields are the most important contextual factors. Moreover, considering claims and actors, public debates about youth are rather similar between the nine countries. This indicates that public debates about youth are patterned by a similar, cross-national differentiation along policy domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research in the social sciences has shown recurrently that life satisfaction varies across countries. More recently, the question was raised whether Europeans are comparing living conditions in European countries, and whether these comparisons are affecting the way they assess their personal situation. The paper uses original survey data from nine European countries in order to answer these questions. We analyze the way European citizens assess the living conditions in the various countries under analysis. And we test whether assessments of other countries are significantly interrelated with reported levels of life satisfaction. Finally, we measure the extent to which these effects hold if other reference groups (friends, neighbors, own country) and individual socio-demographic traits are included in the analysis. Our findings paint a mixed picture. Assessing living conditions in other European countries is widely diffused and attests a marked 'cognitive Europeanization'. However, comparisons with other countries play a less relevant role for reported life satisfaction, when compared to the assessment of the own national economy and the own household situation. Moreover, Switzerland as a non-EU-member is a more significant target than most other EU-members, attesting that we are rather speaking of a European frame of reference, than an EU-related one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many observers have voiced their concerns that solidarity is at risk in Europe. Given this wider context, we are urgently in need of sound empirical analyses examining the various dimensions of solidarity in Europe. Public debates focus on solidarity in many respects but there is to date a lack of empirical evidence to draw upon to inform them. In this context, this special issue emerges from research conducted in the European Union–funded research project TransSOL devoted to the study of European solidarity ("European Paths to Transnational Solidarity in Times of Crisis") running from 2015 to 2018. The project received funding under the Horizon 2020 program (Grant Agreement No. 649435). Christian Lahusen at the University of Siegen coordinated the overall project and Maria Grasso at the University of Sheffield coordinated the population survey for the project. The TransSOL survey includes approximately 2,000 respondents from each of the eight countries of the project (total N ~ 16,000): Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. In the context of the project, the aim of the cross-national survey was to build a comparative dataset that would allow us to answer our theoretically relevant questions of interest on European solidarity such as those discussed in this introduction and in the other articles of this special issue. The articles in this special issue all analyze the data from this original survey dataset to shed systematic light into key theoretically-driven research questions on various aspects of European solidarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Europeans proclaim a readiness to engage for solidarity in support of others, even across their most immediate environment. However, our knowledge is rather limited on how widespread transnational European solidarity might be. Additionally, we do not know what kinds of beliefs and ideas are patterning cognitively the popular conceptions of transnational European solidarity. This article aims to present fresh insights on all these aspects. The analysis is based on a survey conducted in the context of the TransSOL project. This survey provides data about citizens reporting to have supported people abroad through various practices. In conceptual and theoretical terms, the article wishes to analyze and discuss transnational European solidarity from the perspective of political citizenship. Findings show that solidarity activities in support of other Europeans are more likely among citizens with "civic" skills and commitments, stronger identifications with the European Union, and preferences for more inclusive social rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The economic crisis following the financial meltdown in 2007 had disparate impacts for citizens of the southern and northern Eurozone member states. In this study, we analyze public debates in Germany and Greece, two countries that have attracted global attention during the crisis, through a political claims analysis based on newspaper articles published between 2005 and 2014. The article makes use of multiple correspondence analysis to detect the patterns governing the discursive construction of the European financial and economic crisis. Our findings corroborate the expected differences between the Greek and German debates in regard to core issues and assessments. However, the de-alignment of political cleavages in both countries is notable and stresses seemingly an underlying mainstreaming process that limits the diversity of crisis-related claims. Related Articles in this Special Issue [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the development of ‘unconventional’ political participation in Germany between 1974 and 2008. Our aim is to describe empirically the evolution of protest actions across time and differences between east and west. Moreover, we strive to unveil explanatory factors by analysing data from the Political Action Survey (1974/75) and the European Values Study (2008) in regard to lawful demonstrations. For this purpose, we draw on scholarly writing and test the causal effects of socio-demographic, social-structural and attitudinal factors. Our findings show that participation in lawful protest forms is not anymore a minoritarian, exceptional or unconventional act of political claims making, but a normal aspect of political behaviour. Demonstrations do not recruit exclusively a specific constituency with a clear social profile, but rather citizens from different social backgrounds and orientations. Moreover, our data suggest a gradual convergence between East and West Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since the beginning of the millennium, the institutions of the European Union have intensified their political efforts to combat youth employment. Youth-specific policy initiatives were launched after the financial and economic crisis of 2008, and the overall subsequent rise of unemployment rates among young people. In this article, we analyse and assess these developments on the basis of an analysis of European policy documents and interviews. Our conclusions are twofold. One, we argue that the Europe 2020 Strategy and its flagship initiatives devoted to youth do not constitute a new policy field or approach, but are rather the outcome of an incrementalist logic of policy development. Two, the European youth strategy is clearly committed to activation, and it pushes policy developments towards a minimalist policy approach of precarious protection. Both developments are explained by the actor constellations and path dependencies of the European policy arena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collective protest actions by the unemployed and the precariously employed spread throughout the European countries during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Social movement scholars became interested in these mobilizations because these protest actions challenged the assumption that poor people and weak interests rarely engage in such activities. This paper deals with these challenges by summarizing and discussing the latest research on the mobilization of the jobless in order to present available findings from three European countries and to unveil conducive conditions. Particular emphasis is placed upon mobilization structures. This paper argues that ongoing changes at a societal level—here mainly related to grievances, constituencies and organizational infrastructures—provide a beneficial background for increasing the probability of collective action by the jobless. While local protests were much more common, attempts to stabilize and widen political mobilization across time and space proved to depend on available political opportunities at the national level. Here, apparent differences between the European countries become evident. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Commercial consultancies in the realm of public affairs and interest intermediation have become an important player within the European Union. This paper presents findings from a survey of commercial interest intermediation. It illustrates that the business has grown and established itself gradually as an accepted and legitimate route of monitoring and influencing European policy-making. Moreover, we perceive that a certain integration and concentration of the business is under way at the European and global level. It is argued that these developments have an impact on European interest intermediation, first, because this business makes public affairs and interest intermediation more systematic, plural and competitive, and, second, because the business serves as an interface between European and global, internal and external affairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The comprehensive and systematic study of collective action organizations (AOs) requires a new methodological approach that takes into account the rise of online sources as well as the new ways in which people interact and participate in politics. This article aims to present and situate in the related literature such an approach, which was recently created and applied in two European Commission funded research projects, LIVEWHAT and TransSOL, across nine and eight countries respectively. Moving beyond recent studies using online sources, our research used a hubs website based approach to study alternative action organizations (AAOs) in the LIVEWHAT project and transnational solidarity AOs in the TransSOL project. The hubs and subhubs websites that aggregate data on AOs in multiple regions were scraped to identify national samples that offer advanced coverage of the repertoire of AO activities, as defined by the teams. These nodal websites were used as sources, similar to the way in which newspapers are treated in protest event analysis. The article situates and compares the new action organization analysis approach against its foundational protest event, protest case, and political claims analyses, as well as other approaches offering data on online activism. It outlines its main features and the related data construction process, while showcasing its application in the two European Commission cross-national projects. Finally, its merits and limitations are discussed, including a reference to how it can be used as a foundation for a mixed-methods approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alternative collective initiatives often emerge during hard times, supporting citizens and helping them meet their increasing needs through nonmainstream economic activities. To this end, citizens organize formal and informal alternative action organizations (AAOs). Recent studies have shown that the economic crisis was a trigger for the founding of a wide variety of new AAOs, especially in the countries most affected, such as Greece and Spain. One aspect of AAOs untouched so far, however, is their life span. This article investigates factors that impact on AAOs’ ability to stay active online, using fresh data on their organizational profiles from their organizational websites. It offers a comparative, systematic analysis of the age structure and the activity rate of AAOs in nine European countries (Greece, Germany, Italy, France, Spain, the United Kingdom, Poland, Switzerland, and Sweden), for the 2007-2016 period. Following the classic resource mobilization theory, we conclude that the lifeline of these organizations, as that of social movement organizations, even when their forms are innovative and alternative, depends on adequate resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]