EU soft law and the functioning of representative democracy: the use of methods of open co-ordination by Dutch and British parliamentarians

Abstract

The Open Method of Co-ordination (OMC) promises to involve a broad range of actors, including members of national parliaments. Several scholars showed that the OMC breaks this promise by affecting the national policy-making process outside of the control of national parliaments. However, this finding can be called into question; scholars drew heavily on anecdotal evidence and did not take sufficiently into account differences between OMCs and member states. This article empirically investigates the use of three OMCs by parliamentarians in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands to assess the performance of national policies related to the knowledge-based society theme. It will be shown that the use of information from OMCs by parliamentarians is dependent on the information provided by the government on the policies OMCs touch upon and the presence of simple benchmarks in an OMC. Moreover, parliamentarians in a consensus democracy use the OMC more frequently.

Keywords:

• European Union
• national parliaments
• Open Method of Co-ordination
• Netherlands
• United Kingdom

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author would like to thank three anonymous referees for the valuable comments and Rory Costello for commenting on earlier drafts.

Notes

Although the Lisbon Council is often seen as the birth of the OMC, the inspiration for this template was drawn from the European Employment Strategy (EES).

A second perspective departs from ‘deliberate democracy’ theories, in which ‘arguing’ between free and equal citizens is considered to be at the core of democratic governance (Borrás and Conzelmann 2007: 540; De La Porte and Nanz 2004; Radulova 2007; Smismans 2004; Treib et al. 2007).

Five benchmarks were defined in the OMC education in 2002: (1) early school leavers; (2) young people with upper secondary education; (3) low-achieving 15 year-olds in reading; (4) graduates in mathematics; (5) participation in lifelong learning (Commission of the European Union 2004). To measure the progress on these benchmarks, eight key issues were identified with 29 indicators to identify best and worst policy practices in member states. The Barcelona Council of 2002 formulated easy to measure benchmarks and indicators for the OMC R&D consisting of (1) an increase in R&D investment in all member states from 1.9 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product in 2000 to 3 per cent in 2010, and (2) an increased share of business funding that should reach two-thirds of total R&D expenditure.