Search

European citizens continue to engage in solidarity activities in support of vulnerable groups within and beyond their own countries. Many of these organised practices of transnational solidarity provide research with important insights into the features and conditions of organisational forms of support. This article makes use of a unique dataset of transnational solidarity organisations in eight European countries during a period of economic recession and immigration crisis, and aims to empirically describe the different forms and types of solidarity prevalent within three different organisational sectors. It strives to identify the organisational features explaining the elective affinities between organisational forms and solidarity approaches. The empirical analysis validates that organisational traits and types matter when favouring vertical and/or horizontal forms of support towards vulnerable groups. Findings corroborate the relevance of professionalisation, aims, and values, in addition to action repertoires to explain organisational profiles and collective approaches to solidarity-based practices. [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]

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]

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]

On both the national and European levels, cooperation between state and society has developed considerably with regard to decision-makingand regulatory enforcement, often with the explicit intention of raising the effectiveness and legitimacy of the regulatory practices. A number of instruments (e.g. voluntary agreements, joint implementation, environmental dispute resolution, legislative consultation and concertation procedures) have been developed and introduced, which seem to generalize and expand cooperation as a principle of environmental regulation altogether. The present paper aims to take up these developments by drawing a picture of cooperative environmental regulation in Great Britain, France, Germany and the USA, the purpose being to delineate and compare national styles or patterns of cooperation. It isargued that each country has a proper way of organizing and molding cooperation within public administration and between state and society. Moreover, each style of cooperation is linked to distinct working relationships, problem-solving approaches and strategies of validation and legitimization. In spite of these different traditions and styles, however, it will be argued that all countries are bringing about a less autonomous and more cooperative state. This general development, which is repeated on the European level as well, raises the need for a more strongly structured and transparent organization of cooperative relations between the state and society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]