The European 'crisis decade' triggered discussions about solidarity and it´s limits; at the policy level, the debates were mostly about determining the deservingness of solidarity of each vulnerable group, and at the street level, actors involved saw the demand for concrete service provision grow while their resources stayed the same or retrenched. This paper is interested in the limits of solidarity precisely at the street level; hence we investigate what combinations of operational conditions (budget, status, volunteers) lead the civil society organizations to engage in more solidarity activities (service provision and advocacy). Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) are, beside the state and the family, a vital provider of solidarity services and a significant actor in advocacy for vulnerable groups. As any organization, CSOs are rationalised structures that pursue a concrete goal and for this purpose, rely on different resources and strategies. The paper, therefore, investigates configurations of operational conditions that account for higher levels of solidarity activities by CSOs in Germany and Greece. These countries have both experienced an increase in the demand of social services while they present different civil society traditions, different welfare systems and have been differently affected by crises. While Germany was less dramatically affected by the financial crisis and voluntarily took in almost a million refugees in 2016, Greece was severely hit by the financial crisis and, located at the EU borderland, has had a different experience with the inflow of migrants and refugees. The analysis builds on a series of semi-structured interviews conducted with CSO representatives of the social sector in the framework of the TransSOL project (www.trans sol.eu) in 2017. We employ a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) to understand the necessary and sufficient conditions under which CSOs are more active, looking at their organizational traits and preconditions, their capacities to mobilise volunteers, their status in the community and their cross-sectional coverage of social issues.

During their early political socialization young people start to recognize their agency as political actors and to develop their political identity. This article presents the findings of a comparative study across different types of youth activism in two cities, Athens and Cologne, which differ in their youth cultures of participation and the opportunities they provide to mobilize. Our data derive from in-depth qualitative interviewing, which is considered to be most fruitful for the exploration of the reasons behind activists' trajectories. We identified three groups of influences: micro-, meso- and macro-level influences, with micro-level influences being most visible in the path of social movement-related activism, meso-level influences being dominant in the path of partisan activism, and macro-level influences prevailing in grassroots activism. Finally, the implications of the differential impact of the studied socio-spatial contexts are critically discussed.