Europeanization and the EU Supranational Multiorganizational Field of Unemployment: Elite-Dominance or New Opportunities?

Abstract

Other chapters look at national public debates and the multiorganizational field (Curtis and Zurcher 1973) over issues relating to unemployment and the unemployed, within a cross-national comparative framework, and between the national and supranational level of decision making. An important general focus of the overall study is the degree of inclusiveness of public debates and multiorganizational fields toward different actor types, with a special focus on the potential for the constituency of the unemployed, and those interest groups and NGOs who make demands on their behalf in the public domain. In this chapter, the focus turns on Europeanization trends within public policy debates over unemployment and their consequences, on the one side, and the nature of the multiorganizational field that has emerged at the supranational level on the other. In this way we aim to contribute to the study of the accessibility of decision making to non-state actors under conditions of Europeanization, through an examination of the public policy field over unemployment and the unemployed. Our study of the European level is twofold: first, we examine public debates over unemployment and, second, we examine the networks of actor relationships that occur over policies relating to unemployment at the supranational European level.