Public Parliamentary Activities and Open Methods of Coordination

Abstract

This study investigates how members of parliament (MPs) of opposition parties in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands go public with information on the performance of national policies from six open methods of coordination (OMCs), and to what extent country differences in the set-up of parliamentary systems matter in this context. The empirical findings indicate that Dutch MPs use more information from OMC reports to shame the incumbent government than do British MPs. In both parliaments these shaming activities take place primarily in committee meetings and have no link with newspaper coverage on OMCs. Activities of MPs aimed at going public with information from OMC reports established only a weak link between OMCs and the citizens in European Union member states.

Keywords:

• European Union
• national parliaments
• open method of coordination
• newspapers
• the Netherlands
• United Kingdom

Note on Author

Rik de Ruiter is an Assistant Professor in the Institute for Public Administration at Leiden University, the Netherlands, email: [email protected]

Notes

1. This OMC template was strongly inspired by the Luxembourg process, designed in 1997 to establish the European Employment Strategy. The latter strategy is referred to in this article as the OMC employment.

2. The other two hypotheses could not be tested quantitatively because of the low number of observations in each subcategory (that is, parliamentary oral or written questions and plenary or committee debates). In the next section descriptive results are presented related to these two hypotheses.

3. The degree of Euroscepticism of MPs is not controlled for because the OMC touches upon national policies and does not result in any shift of competences from the national to the EU level. This is also explicitly recognised by MPs in the UK and the Netherlands, who expressed support in parliamentary discussions of the government on the principles of cross-national policy learning through OMCs.