A vibrant debate on the digitalisation of the economy has taken place over the last decade. Among the various manifestations of digitalisation, the rise of platform companies has divided scholars over whether a ‘platformised’ future of work would be desirable. The contract classification of platform workers, i.e. whether they should qualify as independent contractors or employees, has been among the top-debated issues. While some have stressed that coverage of freelancer platform workers should be strengthened regardless of their contract classification, others have highlighted how platform work has all the features of dependent work and should therefore qualify as such. Various national regulatory processes resulted in numerous statutory measures and collective agreements. Starting from these developments, and unsatisfied with existing institutionalist accounts of platform work regulation, this dissertation asks two research questions: i) How have national actors problematised and responded to the question of platform workers’ contract classification? ii) What were the drivers of such problematisation and responses? To address such queries, this thesis investigates the politics of platform workers’ contract classification by concentrating on i) the (evolution of) actors’ positions, ii) the building of actor coalitions, iii) the content of regulatory measures in cases they were adopted. It focuses on four actor types, namely governments, social partners, platforms, and independent platform worker organisations. It adopts a qualitative comparative case-study design to study the cases of Denmark, France, Italy and the Netherlands. Such countries represent different ‘varieties of liberalisation’: ‘dualisation’ countries (France – Italy), ‘embedded flexibilisation’ countries (Denmark – Netherlands). Methodologically, this work combines 68 semi-structured elite interviews with selected policy documents and quality newspaper articles. Data was analysed through a thematic analysis using MAXQDA software. Theoretically, ...