Professor Jonathan Zeitlin, University of Wisconsin-Madison / USA
The Open Method of Coordination and Reform of national Social and Employment Policies: Influences, Mechanisms, Effects.
Understanding the influence of the OMC on the reform of national social and employment policies is an extremely challenging task, both theoretically and empirically.
The OMC is an iterative process based on ongoing collaboration between EU institutions and member states, which aims to promote convergence of performance towards common objectives rather than harmonization of national policies, and does not necessarily result in new legislation or justiciable obligations. Member state governments may also have political reasons for playing up or down OMC influence on national policies, flowing from domestic strategies of blame avoidance and credit claiming on the one hand and EU strategies of self-presentation as “good Europeans” or “defenders of the national interest” on the other. Thus statements about the sources of policy change in official documents or elite interviews cannot be taken at face value, but must instead be carefully triangulated with other evidence through contextualized process tracing. In each of these respects, the OMC encapsulates in extreme form the broader methodological problems involved in studying the impact of ‘Europeanization’ on domestic policy and politics. Drawing on a comprehensive review of existing research on the OMC, this paper analyzes and empirically assesses its influences, mechanisms of operation, and effects on national social and employment policies.
It begins by distinguishing two main types of OMC influence, which are supported by case-study evidence.
The first comprises various forms of substantive policy change, including alterations in national policy thinking (cognitive shifts), changes in national policy agendas (political shifts), and changes in specific national policies (programmatic shifts).
The second type of influence involves procedural changes in governance and policy-making arrangements, including better horizontal coordination and cross-sectoral integration, improvements in national steering capacity, enhanced vertical coordination between levels of governance, increased involvement of non-state actors, and the development of transnational networks for the participation of non-state/subnational actors at EU level.
The paper then goes on to examine and assess the respective contribution to these different types of influence on national policies of a series of distinct mechanisms and effects associated with the OMC, including external pressure from the EU and other member states, EU financial support, socialization and persuasion (normative/discursive effects), mutual learning (both direct/first-order and indirect/higher-order effects), and creative appropriation by domestic actors (leverage and democratizing destabilization effects).
While finding supporting evidence for each of these mechanisms, the paper argues that OMC processes' strongest influence on national policies has come through their creative appropriation by domestic actors, both within and beyond government.
The paper concludes by considering the implications of these findings for broader debates about changing national welfare and employment regimes. The the influence of OMC processes on national social and employment reforms depends partly on domestic institutional and political conditions, notably variations in popular/public attitudes towards the EU (integrationist/Euroskeptic); state and constitutional structures (unitary/federal/decentralized); forms of interest intermediation (corporatist/pluralist); and perceived levels of fit/misfit between European objectives, guidelines, and targets on the one hand and domestic policies and performance on the other.
But the OMC’s influence depends even more on its creative appropriation by domestic actors. Hence, as with EU legislation more generally, high levels of misfit are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the OMC’s domestic influence. Across a wide range of social and employment policy issues, moreover, OMC processes throw up adjustment challenges to all participating member states, not only to a specific class of poor performers. The OMC’s leverage and democratizing destabilization effects empower weaker actors within and beyond government, rather than merely reinforcing existing power balances and governance arrangements. For each of these reasons, OMC processes tend to encourage hybridization and path-shifting adjustment of national social and employment policies, rather than merely reproducing pre-existing regime trajectories.
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