MARC SCHATTENMANN
OPEN METHOD OF COORDINATION (2006 APSA)
2 OF 28
tion would provide incentives for the postulated behavior, i.e. in our case policy learning. I believe
that obstacles to learning in a power-driven environment have been systematically understated. My
own 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 learner-friendly “communica-
tive rationality” of arguing in OMC.
My critique of the empirical basis of the claims about OMC and policy learning follows di-
rectly from these theoretical considerations. I will argue that we should relax the theoretical re-
quirement to keep behavioral postulates fixed and consistent within and across institutional settings
if and only if
empirical evidence makes it necessary – either because observable behavior cannot be
explained with the chosen postulates or because it has been observed that “actor orientations” are
indeed different in OMC and CM. While it is certainly tricky to gather that kind of evidence, I be-
lieve that a qualitative approach centered on elite interviews should be part of the respective re-
search strategy.
Pursuing these theoretical and empirical arguments seems worthwhile for at least three rea-
sons. First, the discussions about the OMC increase our theoretical understanding of different
modes of governance: how they work, why they are selected by policy-makers, how they evolve,
how they compare to each other in terms of effectiveness, efficiency, and other criteria. In this
sense, they are an essential part of the classic task of comparative politics, i.e. to analyze, understand
and evaluate different processes for dealing with collective problems and to propose better ones.
Second, an examination of the claims of policy-learning associated with OMC contributes to the
research on policy learning and policy diffusion that has become an important subfield of policy
analysis over the past ten or fifteen years (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1993; Hall 1989, 1993;
Dolowitz and Marsh 1996, 2000; Bandelow 2003).
Last but not least, there is the pragmatic usefulness of these arguments. If we look at the dis-
cussion about the effectiveness of OMC from the policy-makers point of view, it boils down to
questions of choice: How should a government react to proposals to extend OMC to new policy
areas (such as immigration or healthcare)? How should it evaluate the pros and cons? Could it use
OMC as a means to speed up or slow down the “Europeanization” in certain policy areas? Will
OMC foster policy learning and deliver on its promises? Helping policy-makers to answer these
questions is precisely the kind of problem-solving activity that should be the hallmark of the policy
sciences, as Harold Lasswell argued half a century ago (Lasswell 1951). As I will argue, the nice twist
here is that the policy-makers themselves hold many of the answers: in most cases, they will be as-
tute judges of their interaction orientations and behavioral dispositions and therefore in a good posi-
tion to ascertain the value of different institutions of governance.
In line with these arguments, I will proceed as follows. Section 2 provides on overview of the
OMC’s institutional history so far and of the corresponding debates in the policy-making and aca-
demic communities. It situates the OMC in the context of EU policy-making mechanisms and pol-
icy areas. Given the focus of the paper on policy-learning, it sets the stage for the subsequent discus-
sions by narrowing down the issue to a choice between “learning” in the OMC and “bargaining” in
the CM.
Accordingly, Section 3 is devoted to a theoretical analysis of acts of institutional choice in-
spired by the works of Mayntz, Scharpf, Diermeier/Krehbiel, and others. As indicated above, the
crucial argument here will be that scholars who advocate the use of OMC because it is supposed to
promote policy learning frequently violate the initial rule that behavioral postulates have to be fixed
and consistent within and across institutional settings if we want to gauge the impacts different insti-
tutions have.
Convention