This book has taken a look back at a difficult period for the labor market in order to inquire into the relationships between political institutional approaches to employment policy and political conflicts mobilized by collective actors over unemployment in the public domain. This is what we have called the contentious politics of unemployment. In more prosaic terms, we have looked at the intervention, in claim making in the public domain, but also in policy networks, on issues relating to unemployment. On a more theoretical level, this volume has tried to bring together two research streams and theoretical traditions that have remained largely unaware of each other: work on social movements and contentious politics, in particular the works that have stressed the impact of political opportunity structures on social protest (see Kriesi 2004a; Meyer 2004 for reviews), on the one hand, and the literature on the comparative political economic of the welfare state on the other (see Arts and Gelissen 2002; Green-Pedersen and Haverland 2000; Pierson 2000a for reviews).