Open method of coordination versus ?

1
Open method of coordination versus ?

• Robert Salais
• Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu
  BerlinCONNEX Mid-term ConferenceMannheim,
  MZES, 3-5 November 2005

2
Information as the basis for coordination

• Data (quantitative or qualitative) are not facts
  of nature, but social facts ? Information is
  built up, produced and selected
• Reports, data, analysis, standards of
  evaluation, indicators, EC recommendations are
  the hard objects of the OMC imposing an
  informational basis for social policies
• A wide neglect in political science ( and
  probably in many others social sciences)
• A market-led shift of the relevant informational
  basis for economic and social policies in Europe
  from the unemployment rate toward the employment
  rate

3
Two simple examples

• First example (EC)
• Does the fact that the 2001 female employment
  rate in the UK (65) is higher than in France
  (56) means that the employment situation is
  better for women in the UK than in France?
• Second example (ILO)
• Does the fact that the percentage of
  trade-union membership is very low in France
  (compared with other countries) means that there
  is almost no trade-union freedom in France?
• WHAT HAVE THESE EXAMPLES IN COMMON?

4
There are four problems (or confusions) at the
basis of the OMC

• A scientific problem
• Measurement ? Evaluation
• Positivist belief is different from searching the
  truth of a given social situation
• An instrumental problem
• Increasing performance ? Improving the situation
  under review
• A normative problem
• Technical choice ? Collective search of a
  normative compromise
• Has optimal management something in common with
  pluralism and deliberative democracy?
• A methodological problem
• What matters as a point of departure for relevant
  research?
• The formal functioning of multi-level procedures
  as ends in themselves,
• Or what effective outcomes European politics
  brings to European citizens with regards to their
  basic aspirations?

5
Transparency and comparability are not so simple

• Data and information come from a production chain
  whose each step is a social process (meaning that
  it is in-depth embedded in specific national,
  social, material and institutional factors)
  (Desrosières, Thévenot, Salais).
• These factors (differing from time and place)
  are
• indigenous categories of perception of social
  phenomena
• normative expectations within social groups or
  countries with regards to state intervention
• social questionnaires, nomenclatures and
  categories
• the formatting of statistics by law and welfare
  policies
• the manipulation of the management rules of
  public agencies.
• To be able to draw relevant political conclusions
  from the OMC methodology, data and information
  should be adjusted in order to be based in the
  same institutional, legal and cognitive rules.

6
Comparing and putting into competition what is
not comparable

• In brief, the EC, through the OMC, compares what
  is not comparable.
• The EC acts as if homogeneity was achieved and a
  unique European space created with common rules,
  institutions and understandings,
• However this is not the case, the OMC (and all
  European tools) having precisely the purpose to
  make progress toward these truly long term
  objectives.
• The gap between European and national categories
  is a reality, materially incorporated into
  situations, institutions, actions, expectations.
  Such reality cannot be eliminated.
• Hence there exists a basic internal contradiction
  within the OMC. In my view this explains the OMC
  instrumentalisation by national governments and
  the Commission.

7
From internal contradiction to instrumentalising
policies

• The fact to deny the existence of this gap, as
  does the OMC, leads to instrumentalising
  policies
• Policy makers act not on market and employment
  realities, but directly on information concerning
  these realities
• This is no more than strategic action applied to
  the functioning of monitoring tools. Far from
  eradicating strategic action, monitoring
  exacerbates it.
• Policy makers progressively enter a process of
  rationally designing self-referring policies
• quantitatively (through optimising indicators)
• or qualitatively (in selecting good practices
  and present them through their best profile).
• This leads to policies and schemes that offer the
  best return in terms of the performances expected
  by the EC.
• Do these policies and schemes, except
  occasionally or by chance, improve the situations
  of the people concerned?
• Many examples quoted or not in Zeitlin and
  Pochet, 2005 the Netherlands (Visser), France
  (Barbier, Salais), the UK, Germany (Hartz
  measures?).

8
Questions for the future

• In brief, the OMC seems a sophisticated version
  of the Rawlsian veil of ignorance to organise
  the collective choice
• Citizens are taken at distance
• Policy makers believe they are not ignorant
  however they are
• For they have no true knowledge about the
  situation and the options under choice, only
  preformatted and monitoring information.
• Alternatives foundations for a European political
  method or How to implant deliberative democracy
  in a world of strategic actors?
• Cognitive objective Evaluation
• Political objective Really improving the
  situations under review
• Procedural objective How to organise the
  collective search of a normative compromise and
  its revision (or adjustment)
• Research question How to de-construct and
  construct alternatives informational bases of the
  social situations of European citizens with
  regards to their basic aspirations
• If so, will the OMC remain the OMC or would it be
  replaced by something different and to invent?

9
(No Transcript)
10
From the governance of heterogeneity to a
politics of diversity?
11
The EES as proxy of a rational cooperative game

• Benchmarking serves to politically monitor the
  EES and not to economically evaluate its
  outcomes.
• Take the Commission and the member states as the
  players. The aim of the game is to maximise
  performance, based on the European tools used to
  measure it. Actors know in advance the formatting
  of future evaluation of their actions. Insofar as
  any learning outcome takes place, it is of a
  rational order and likely to affect the
  procedure. Cooperation consists, for each member
  state, in manipulating the rules of its own
  measures and their implementation to meet the
  requirements of European indicators and
  guidelines. It is not a collective action aimed
  at genuinely improving employment in Europe.
• Due the limited competences given to the European
  level, member states are not held responsible for
  a substantial improvement in European employment,
  nor do they feel themselves accountable to such
  improvement when they define their employment
  policy actions. The only constraint is that they
  have agreed and this commitment derives from
  the management by objectives of the OMC to be
  accountable vis-à-vis the Commission with regard
  to their scores over the whole set of indicators.
  
• All the EES actors (the Commission included) have
  albeit for differing reasons a political
  interest in arguing and publicly declaring that
  the EES is a valuable European achievement. Each
  party behaves in a manner designed to exhibit
  measurable progress. The behaviour in question
  has to be described to others (exchange of good
  practice) and made public (this being the
  purpose of the Joint Annual Employment Report).

12
In other words,

• To what extent is it conceivable to assimilate
• A neighbourhood community aiming at collectively
  improve its local police (Sabel ideal-type)
• And
• A system of national and supranational actors
  superlatively trained into strategic action and
  bargaining?
• Footnote Due the limited competences given to
  the European level, member states are not held
  responsible for a substantial improvement in
  European employment, nor do they feel themselves
  accountable to such improvement when they define
  their employment policy actions. The only
  constraint is that they have agreed and this
  commitment derives from the management by
  objectives of the OMC to be accountable
  vis-à-vis the Commission with regard to their
  national scores over the whole set of indicators.