Author's Keywords: policy learning, open method of coordination, European Union, governance, institutionalism	Convention Submission, Review, and Scheduling! All Academic Convention can help with all of your abstract management needs and many more. Contact us today for a quote! Submission - Custom fields, multiple submission types, tracks, audio visual, multiple upload formats, automatic conversion to pdf. Review - Peer Review, Bulk reviewer assignment, bulk emails, ranking, z-score statistics, and multiple worksheets! Reports - Many standard and custom reports generated while you wait. Print programs with participant indexes, event grids, and more! Scheduling - Flexible and convenient grid scheduling within rooms and buildings. Conflict checking and advanced filtering. Communication - Bulk email tools to help your administrators send reminders and responses. Use form letters, a message center, and much more! Management - Search tools, duplicate people management, editing tools, submission transfers, many tools to manage a variety of conference management headaches! Click here for more information.
Association: Name: American Political Science Association URL: http://www.apsanet.org
Citation: URL: http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p151928_index.html Direct Link: HTML Code:

Schattenmann, Marc. "Games Real Governments Play. The European Union's Open Method of Coordination and the Claim of Policy Learning" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Marriott, Loews Philadelphia, and the Pennsylvania Convention Center, Philadelphia, PA, Aug 31, 2006 <Not Available>. 2011-03-13 <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p151928_index.html>

Schattenmann, M. , 2006-08-31 "Games Real Governments Play. The European Union's Open Method of Coordination and the Claim of Policy Learning" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Marriott, Loews Philadelphia, and the Pennsylvania Convention Center, Philadelphia, PA Online <APPLICATION/PDF>. 2011-03-13 from http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p151928_index.html

Publication Type: Proceeding Abstract: Since the late 1990s, the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) has gained prominence as a new ap-proach to policy-making within the European Union’s multi-level system of governance. Today, OMC is the modus operandi in many policy areas, e.g. research & innovation, social inclusion, pensions, and it will be extended to further areas like health care. One of the claims put forward by advocates and analysts of OMC is that it is an “architecture of policy learning” (Overdevest 2002; cf. Ferrera et al 2002; Knill and Lenschow 2003; Eberlein and Ker-wer 2004). Therefore, it is seen by many as the preferable alternative to the voting, bargaining and struggle for power associated with the traditional EU decision-making procedures, especially the Com-munity Method (CM). In my view however, the theoretical and empirical bases for the claims about OMC and policy learning are not (yet) strong enough to underscore/prove the virtues of OMC. Drawing, among others, on institutional theories put forward by Scharpf (Games Real Actors Play, 1997) and Dier-meier/Krehbiel (Institutionalism as a Methodology, 2003), I argue that if the focus is on how institu-tions like OMC and CM affect collective choices, it is crucial that researches keep behavioral postulates fixed and consistent within and across institutional settings (at least initially). Otherwise, it becomes problematic to gauge the difference the institutions make for, first, actual behavior, and, subsequently, outcomes. While the relationship between institutions and behavior admittedly has some traits of a chicken-and-egg problem, at least one factor has to be kept fixed because only the demonstration of causal relationships between independent, intervening, and dependent variables is able to yield plausi-ble explanations. In my view, some of advocates of OMC have glossed over this difficulty: they rather assume differ-ent behavioral rationalities in OMC and CM, instead of showing how OMC as an institution provides incentives for the postulated behavior (esp. learning) or instead of providing empirical proofs that behavioral dispositions or “interaction orientations” are different in OMC and CM. Obstacles to learn-ing in a power-driven environment are systematically understated. My hypothesis is that the two institutions are not so different as to give rise to two different “ra-tionalities”: the “strategic rationality” of “bargaining” in CM and the “communicative rationality” of arguing in OMC.

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The Politics of Policy-making in Democracy Promotion: A Study of American and European Actors

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