(Page 1 of 28) - Games Real Governments Play. The European Union's Open Method of Coordination and the Claim of Policy Learning authored by Schattenmann, Marc.

Prepared for delivery at the 2006 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, August 30th-
September 3, 2006. Copyright by the American Political Science Association. A travel grant from the Faculty of
Law, Economics, and Social Sciences at the University of Erfurt is gratefully acknowledged.

Marc Schattenmann

Junior Professor of Public Policy

University of Erfurt

marc.## email not listed ##

Games Real Governments Play:

The European Union’s Open Method of Coordination

and the Claim of Policy Learning

14 August 2006

Introduction

Since the late 1990s, the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) has gained prominence as a new
approach 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, pen-
sions, and is likely to be extended to further areas like health care.

One of the claims put forward by policymakers and academics who support and promote the

use of OMC is that it is an “architecture of policy learning” (Overdevest 2002; cf. Ferrera et al 2002;
Knill and Lenschow 2003; Eberlein and Kerwer 2004). By virtue of this trait, its advocates portray
OMC as a viable, if not superior alternative to two other EU decision-making procedures: OMC is
supposed to avoid both the voting, bargaining and struggle for power associated with the classical
community method (CM) as well as the “loose talk” and dysfunctions that plague intergovernmental
cooperation (IGC) in the second pillar, i.e. the Common Foreign and Security Policy.

In my view however, the claim that OMC is an effective mechanism of governance that fos-

ters policy learning is not as strong and convincing as OMC’s advocates make it out to be. I will
argue that it is beset by two weaknesses: (1) in terms of its assumptions, it is theoretically deficient,
and (2) in terms of its findings, it is (as yet) empirically insufficient.

My argument about the problematic theoretical assumptions of a lot of pro-OMC work is an

argument about institutional theory. Drawing, among others, on the institutional theories put for-
ward by Renate Mayntz and Fritz Scharpf (Mayntz and Scharpf 1995; Scharpf 1997, 2000) and
Daniel Diermeier and Keith Krehbiel (2003), I argue that if the focus is on how institutions like
OMC and CM affect collective behavior, it is crucial that researches keep behavioral postulates fixed
and consistent within and across institutional settings (at least initially). Otherwise, it becomes prob-
lematic 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, all but one factor have to be kept fixed analytically at any one point. It is
only by doing this that we can hope to identify the causal relationships between the variables that
explain OMC’s inner workings and its external effects.

In my assessment, some advocates of OMC have glossed over this difficulty: they rather as-

sume

different behavioral dispositions in OMC and CM, instead of showing how OMC as an institu-