Assessing the Open Method of Coordination

Institutional Design and National Influence of EU Social Policy Coordination

E. Barcevicius, T. Weishaupt, J. Zeitlin, E. Barcevicius, T. Weishaupt, J. Zeitlin, Kenneth A. Loparo, Egidijus Barcevi?ius

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781349437917, 9781137022615
• eBook ISBN: 9781137022622
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Economic Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Based on the findings of a large-scale, comparative research project, this volume systematically assesses the institutional design and national influence of the Open Method of Coordination in Social Inclusion and Social Protection (pensions and health/long-term care), at the European Union level and in ten EU Member States.

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Institutional Design and National Influence of EU Social Policy Coordination: Advancing a Contradictory Debate

Jonathan Zeitlin, Egidijus Barcevičius, and J. Timo Weishaupt

1 Introduction

Since the early 1990s, the European Union (EU) and its Member States have been committed to promoting social inclusion and to sustaining and modernizing Europe’s social protection systems. The recent global financial and sovereign debt crises have once again demonstrated – both positively and negatively – not only the critical importance of modern welfare states, but also the need for the EU to play an active role in coordinating and supporting national responses aimed at both economic recovery and social equity (Hemerijck 2013).

As the EU enjoys only limited legal authority to influence national social policies, its main vehicle in this field since the turn of the millennium has been the Open Method of Coordination (OMC), an iterative process based on common European objectives, indicators for assessing progress towards them, and organized mutual learning. OMC processes in different policy domains vary considerably in institutionalization, modalities, and procedures, depending on the nature of the field, the Treaty base of EU competences, and the willingness of Member States to undertake joint action.¹ In Social Inclusion and Social Protection, the OMC during the first decade of the 21st century involved an obligation to produce National Action Plans and Strategic Reports (NAPs/NSRs) in which Member States explained how and with what results they have pursued the common EU objectives in their domestic policies; Joint Reports by the Commission and the Council that analysed Member State progress, highlighted areas in need of attention, and identified priorities for future action; and peer-review exercises where national officials, NGOs, academic experts, and other stakeholders came together to discuss key issues and learn from one another’s practices and experiences. The OMC on Social Inclusion and Social Protection (or ‘Social OMC’) comprises three sectoral strands, covering social inclusion (since 2000), pensions (since 2001), and health and long-term care (since 2004), which were ‘streamlined’ into a single overarching process in 2006.

While building on earlier models such as the European Employment Strategy (EES, inaugurated in 1997), the OMC was formally launched as a new governance instrument for the EU in 2000 as part of the Lisbon Strategy, which sought to bring economic, employment, and social policies into a mutually reinforcing equilibrium. Although criticism of the Lisbon Strategy as a whole abounds, the Social OMC arguably advanced a sustained European discussion about how best to strengthen national capacities to tackle challenges associated with old and new social risks in the context of demographic ageing, changing career patterns and family structures, migration, and economic restructuring. When the Lisbon Strategy expired in 2010, it was replaced by the Europe 2020 Strategy, which strengthened the commitment to EU social cohesion objectives by introducing new headline targets and integrated guidelines aimed – inter alia – at reducing poverty and social exclusion. Chapter 2 traces the institutional development of the Social OMC, and analyses its evolving relationship with the Lisbon Strategy and Europe 2020.

Although the EU commitment to continue an overarching joint strategy may be taken as confirmation of a shared belief in the value of such policy coordination processes, the evidence for their success remains ambiguous and contested. Many observers have wondered whether a formally voluntary, non-binding process with little capacity to sanction Member State behaviour can really influence national policies, and if so, under what conditions? In addressing these questions, there remains a clear division between those scholars (and policy practitioners) who believe that the Social OMC is nothing more than ‘window dressing’ or a ‘red herring’, and those who consider it instead an important vehicle for progressive reform, enhancing mutual learning among Member States, and giving voice to civil society stakeholders. These contradictory interpretations of the same phenomenon are hardly surprising considering the current state of the literature, discussed in greater detail in the next section.

Despite the rapid growth in publications on the Social OMC, many analytical and empirical questions remain. First, most scholars have focused primarily on its initial phase, that is the period from 2000 through 2005. Hence, much of the ‘action’ has been overlooked, which is especially problematic since the OMC is an iterative process, whose full impact may become apparent only after years of reporting, deliberating, and learning. Moreover, as noted above, the architecture of EU social policy coordination was transformed in 2006 by the ‘streamlining’ of three previously separate sectoral processes for social inclusion, pensions, and health/long-term care into the Social OMC. But whether and how this streamlining has affected the efficiency and effectiveness of the Social OMC remains largely unexplored. Most scholarship is not comparative across policy fields and countries, but either reflects on the OMC from a theoretical perspective or assesses its impact in one or a few cases. Conceptually, too, the criteria for assessing the success of the OMC remain very much an open question. Paradoxically, the same evidence is often used by different authors to demonstrate that the OMC is or is not working effectively. Thus, a large-scale comparative study based on a common analytical framework is of great potential value in identifying broader patterns of OMC influence on national policymaking and the causal mechanisms underlying them.

We offer a fresh approach to this controversy, drawing on the results of precisely such a large-scale research project conducted on behalf of the European Commission (PPMI 2011a), focused on the impact and effectiveness of the Social OMC during the post-streamlining phase 2006–2010. In the course of this project, more than 350 interviews with national experts and stakeholders from 11 EU Member States (Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, and the UK), EU institutions, and EU-level NGOs were conducted; 60 EU-level experts and policymakers completed customized surveys; a wide range of primary and secondary sources were gathered and evaluated; and the findings were brought together and synthesized by the editors of this volume. The study and its conclusions were presented and discussed at each stage of the process with EU officials, European and national stakeholders, and academic experts.

While the EU received a report, comprising several hundred pages organized around predetermined terms of reference, this book presents a state-of-the-art overview and assessment of the OMC’s institutional design and national influence with an explicit analytical focus and structure. It not only represents a full-scale revision of the report presented to the Commission, but also reflects on recent policy developments, such as Europe 2020 and its social dimension, and speaks directly to current academic and policy debates. In addition to providing a wealth of new empirical material on the operation of the Social OMC, the book contributes to a number of academic literatures, including those on new modes of governance and institutional change in European welfare states. It addresses key scholarly issues, above all the nature and extent of the Social OMC’s influence on EU and national policymaking, using an original and consistent analytical framework. Building on an authoritative assessment of the Social OMC’s operation over its first decade, the book also offers an empirically grounded perspective on the lessons of this experience for the new framework of EU socio-economic policy coordination that has emerged since 2010, whose contours remain fluid and subject to ongoing debate.

The body of this introductory chapter is organized as follows. The next section reviews the contradictory debate on the Social OMC, seeking to disentangle the normative, theoretical, and empirical sources of disagreements over its assessment. The third and final section outlines the research strategy and analytical framework for assessing the Social OMC adopted in this study, while also providing a road map to the rest of the volume.

2 Disentangling a contradictory debate

Despite many nuances and qualifications on both sides, assessments of the Social OMC (like that of the OMC more generally) remain highly polarized between those holding globally positive and negative views. On the positive side, the OMC has been hailed as a valuable instrument for pursuing common European concerns while respecting legitimate national diversity, because it commits Member States to work together in reaching joint goals without seeking to homogenize their inherited policy regimes and institutional arrangements (Hemerijck and Berghman 2004; Zeitlin 2003; 2005b). The OMC has likewise been advanced as a cognitive and normative framework for defining and building consensus around a distinctive European (or ‘EU’) social model, and for guiding progressive reform or ‘recalibration’ of national welfare regimes in response to new challenges and changing distributions of social risk (Vandenbroucke 2002; Ferrera 2009). Insofar as the OMC obliges Member States to pool information, compare themselves to one another, and reassess current policies and programmes in the light of their relative performance, it has been welcomed as a promising mechanism for promoting experimental learning and deliberative problem-solving across the EU (Zeitlin 2003; 2005a; 2005b). For many of its proponents, finally, the Social OMC, above all its social inclusion strand, has been embraced as a key platform for giving voice to relevant civil society actors and involving them in social policymaking at both EU and national levels (EAPN 2008a; Social Platform 2009).

Although individual assessments naturally differ, observers starting out from such views of the purpose and promise of the Social OMC often regard it as a ‘qualified success’. Most salient in this regard are the positive influences attributed to the OMC on national policy thinking and debates (ideational and agenda shifts), and governance and policy-making arrangements (procedural shifts), as well as on mutual learning among EU Member States.² At the same time, however, such commentators also typically call attention to significant weaknesses as well as strengths in the Social OMC’s institutional design and operating procedures, particularly as regards its openness, transparency, and visibility on the one hand, and integration into broader national and EU policy-making processes on the other (Zeitlin 2005b; 2008; 2009; 2010; Frazer and Marlier 2010a; Armstrong 2010). Among EU policy actors, both Member State representatives in the Social Protection Committee (SPC) and leading NGO networks, such as the Social Platform, the European Anti-Poverty Network (EAPN), the European Network of Organisations Working with the Homeless (FEANTSA), have likewise reaffirmed their critical support for the Social OMC as a vital component of EU policy coordination, while proposing a variety of reforms aimed at enhancing its effectiveness (Social Platform 2009; SPC 2011d; EAPN 2011; Gosmé 2012).

On the negative side, critics of the Social OMC typically focus on its lack of legitimacy and/or effectiveness. In terms of ‘input legitimacy’, a frequently voiced critique by both academic and political commentators is that the OMC’s ‘soft’ procedures represent a threat to the ‘Community Method’ of EU policymaking, based on binding legislation or ‘hard law’ initiated by the Commission, enacted by the Council and the Parliament, and enforced by the Court of Justice (Hatzopoulos 2007; European Parliament 2007). A closely related objection is that the OMC is democratically illegitimate insofar as it bypasses parliamentary authorization and scrutiny at both EU and national levels, without putting in place alternative effective mechanisms for civil society participation (Kröger 2007; 2008; 2009; Tsakatika 2007; Büchs 2008a; Dawson 2011). In terms of ‘output legitimacy’, other critics see the OMC not as an instrument for building Social Europe, but instead as a neo-liberal Trojan horse for dismantling national welfare states: a mechanism for ‘unlearning’ the lessons of post-war socially embedded capitalism (Offe 2003; Flear 2009).³ At a procedural level, some commentators regard the OMC not as a platform for collaboration between EU institutions and Member States or participation of civil society actors, but rather as a Foucaultian tool for ‘governance at a distance’, concentrating power in the hands of the Commission and national executives (Haahr 2004; Smismans 2004; 2008). In a similar vein, some critics (notably among the German Länder) have denounced the OMC as a covert device for undermining subsidiarity by allowing the EU to encroach illegitimately into policy domains reserved by the Treaties to the Member States (and within the latter by national constitutions to regional authorities) (Syrpis 2002).⁴

Most of these objections to the Social OMC’s legitimacy concern its alleged pernicious effects. But the most widespread criticism of the OMC focuses paradoxically instead on claims about its lack of substantive impact at EU and national level. According to this view, the OMC amounts to little more than a form of ‘window dressing’ or symbolic politics where national governments repackage existing policies to demonstrate their apparent compliance with EU objectives. Some critics brand the OMC a ‘fashionable red herring’, which distracts attention from the truly significant current developments in EU governance, such as the rise of detailed regulation and rights litigation or ‘Eurolegalism’ (Idema and Kelemen 2006; Kelemen 2011). Others draw attention to the OMC’s lack of ‘convergence capacity’ and ‘control mechanisms’, which would be necessary to exert a substantial influence on national policy (Citi and Rhodes 2007; Lodge 2007), or point to the inability of the Social OMC’s ‘soft’ procedures to resist broader trends towards neo-liberal welfare retrenchment (Kröger 2008; 2009; Büchs 2009). Some commentators, finally, focus on the absence of appropriate institutional conditions for mutual learning within the OMC and the weakness of incentives to support policy transfer across Member States (Citi and Rhodes 2007; Hartlapp 2009).

One key reason for the contradictory character of the OMC debate is the complex intertwining of normative, theoretical, and empirical sources of disagreement among the participants. Thus, for example, proponents and opponents of the OMC often disagree normatively and theoretically as well as empirically about what such policy coordination processes are or should be trying to achieve. Should OMC processes be considered as a form of ‘soft law’, similar in character to but less binding than legislation (de la Rosa 2005; Hatzopoulos 2007), or instead as an alternative and/or complement to uniform ‘hard law’ at the European level (Trubek and Trubek 2005; Armstrong 2010)? Should they be assessed in terms of their capacity to secure convergence of policies across EU Member States (Citi and Rhodes 2007), or rather in terms of their ability to promote continuous improvement and upward convergence of performance, through reflexive comparisons of experience in pursuing alternative approaches to achieving common objectives in different national contexts (Zeitlin 2003; 2005a; 2005b; 2009; Sabel and Zeitlin 2008)? Should direct transfer of identical policies and programmes from one country to another serve as the yardstick for evaluating the mutual learning potential of OMC processes (Casey and Gold 2005; Kerber and Eckardt 2007; Hartlapp 2009), or instead their capacity to stimulate creative adaptation of foreign models and practices to fit local circumstances through ‘contextualised benchmarking’ and ‘analogic’ rather than ‘mimetic’ learning (Hemerijck and Visser 2001; Zeitlin 2003; 2005b; 2009; Visser 2009; van Gerven and Beckers 2009)?

Normative considerations are obviously paramount in disagreements over the criteria for assessing the OMC’s legitimacy. For many participants in the OMC debate, no policymaking process, whatever its formal legal status, can be considered democratically legitimate if it is not directly subject to parliamentary authorization and judicial review. For others, conversely, alternative normative criteria, such as openness, transparency, stakeholder participation, and deliberative decision-making, may also contribute positively to the legitimacy of policy coordination processes within the EU. But even where commentators concur on the pertinence of the latter criteria, they often disagree sharply on their empirical application to specific OMC processes.

Theoretical assumptions derived from competing approaches to institutional analysis underlie much of the disagreement about what kinds of impacts a formally voluntary, non-binding policy coordination process like the OMC could be expected to produce. Thus, rationalist approaches based on the ‘logic of consequences’ typically follow a hard-law model in assessing the actual and potential impact of OMC processes, in which the precision of EU objectives and guidelines, together with the positive and negative sanctions attached to them, shape the incentives for compliance on the part of national policymakers. Constructivist approaches based on the ‘logic of appropriateness’ emphasize instead the role of sociological mechanisms, such as socialization, emulation, peer pressure, and discursive diffusion, in inducing domestic actors to internalize and transfer norms and ideas propagated by OMC processes from the EU to the national context or between Member States. For experimentalist approaches, the key mechanisms for the OMC’s potential influence are the institutional arrangements for reflexive learning and iterative revision of its objectives, metrics, and procedures through peer review of alternative approaches to implementation in different local contexts. Historical-institutionalist approaches to the OMC, like those to Europeanization more generally (cf. Graziano and Vink 2007), emphasize less the possible mechanisms of influence than the weight of path dependency and the mediating role of domestic institutions and structures in channelling and containing the impact of EU coordination processes on national policies and practices.

Conceptual disagreements derived from these competing theoretical approaches likewise underlie much of the empirical controversy about the OMC’s impact and influence. Thus, many rationalist and historical-institutionalist critics of the OMC take substantive policy change, especially as reflected in new legislation, as their main criterion for assessing its impact within the Member States. Constructivist and experimentalist analysts, by contrast, draw attention to a wider range of potential influences, including not only procedural changes in governance processes, but also ideational and discursive shifts, along with changes in issue salience and political agendas, through which the OMC may affect policies and policymaking at both national and European levels.

Given such theoretical and normative controversies about the appropriate criteria for assessing the effectiveness and legitimacy of the OMC, it is hardly surprising that researchers studying the same national and sectoral cases often disagree about the magnitude and significance of its influence, someti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. Institutional Design and National Influence of EU Social Policy Coordination: Advancing a Contradictory Debate
• 2. Tracing the Social OMC from Its Origins to Europe 2020
• 3. Is the Social OMC Fit for Purpose? Adequacy and Institutional Design, 2006–2010
• 4. An OMC for All Policies: Is Belgium (still) the Best Pupil in the Class?
• 5. The Social OMC in France: The Realm of the Happy Few?
• 6. The Social OMC in Germany: Slow but Steady?
• 7. The Social OMC in Denmark: European Ideas Meet Domestic Politics
• 8. The Social OMC in the UK: Beyond Cheap Talk?
• 9. The Social OMCs at Work: Identifying and Explaining Variations in National Use and Influence
• References
• Index