Measuring Cooperation through Events. a Social Network Analysis of Cooperation between Social Movement and Trade Union Organizations in the Anti-Austerity Protests.

Austerity politics in Europe is said to have facilitated a new wave of cooperation between social movement organizations and trade unions. Yet while joint mobilization of those two types of organizational forms has empirically ben observed, we don’t now in which incidents what specific kind of organizations cooperate. Are rather big and resource rich movement and union organizations cooperating, or ideologically similar organizations? Or do they cooperate to form insider outsider -coalitions using different tactics to reach a common goal? And under which conditions is cooperation more likely to emerge? Taking the example of the Alter Summit anti austerity network, this paper tackles these questions by using a social network analysis to study cooperation events. These events can be protest events but also less visible, but nevertheless crucial manifestations of collaboration, like background meetings and joint position papers. I use resources, culture, and political-economic opportunity factors from both social movement and industrial theories alike to explain the observed cooperation patterns in the Alter Summit network. Understanding this pattern of cooperation can contribute viral insights to our perception of transnational collective action between actors from different movement backgrounds.