THERE ARE COALITIONS EVERYWHERE

ABSTRACT

Do members of the committees under the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) find that there are coalitions of specific member states in these committees? If so, then what kind of side payments hold these coalitions together? For the first time in scholarly literature, and based on an empirical investigation, the findings in this paper document that two opposing coalitions – with the United Kingdom and France as the respective leaders – exist in OMC committees where mutual learning is the raison d’être. In the existing theory on this subject in the EU, it is claimed that consensus decision-making leads to a weakening of coalition-building. All three committees analysed in this paper build on consensus decision-making, which is achieved after intensive meetings between all the members. However, it is contended that the ‘argumentative contest’ working method of the OMC committees leads to more – not less – coalition-building. On the basis of a test, it is also shown that these committees are primarily held together by side payments in the form of ‘promises relating to policy among the like-minded’; however, ‘payments allied to subsequent decisions’ add to the cement of the coalition-building processes stemming from the OMC working method.

Keywords:

• European Union
• side-payments
• open method of coordination
• coalitions
• committees

Acknowledgements

I wish to acknowledge the contribution of my research assistants in preparing this paper: Kasper Lindskow, Thomas Horn and Henrik Bliddal. Also comments made by Ove K. Pedersen, Ole Helby Petersen and Lars Bo Kaspersen at a work-in-progress seminar at Copenhagen Business School has lifted the quality of the paper. Last but not least, comments from two anonymous referees have made me think things over several times to the benefit of the quality of the paper.

Notes

¹I distinguish between consensus and unanimity. Consensus is when all members of a decision-making body passively accept a proposal. Unanimity is when all members of a decision-making body explicitly participate in making a decision through a voting procedure.

²Cf. Riker (1962: 100). This is, however, not always the empirical outcome as other factors such as ‘language, history, and general cultural characteristics’ are determinants of EU coalition building in the Council of Ministers (Kaeding and Selck (2005: 282).

³See footnote 2 above.

⁴This article draws on the Ebbinghaus categorisation of the European countries in four categories, in addition to which a fifth category including the new transition economies has been added. This categorisation is one of many that have been suggested in the literature on varieties of capitalism and types of welfare states. An excellent overview of the different categorisations presented in the literature can be found in Jackson (2002).

⁵The questionnaire, the collected data etc. is available at the author's homepage www.cbs.dk/staff/pne

⁶The alternates occasionally participated in the committee work instead of the ordinary members.

⁷In the questionnaire, the respondents were asked directly about the fragmentation in the committees, and they were asked to indicate the level of fragmentation (see the questionnaire on my homepage: www.cbs.dk/staff/pne).