ABSTRACT
In Europe, Continental and Mediterranean welfare states in particular, currently face severe exogenous and endogenous challenges. Increasing global competition, demographic changes, and changing values render established welfare and employment policies ever less adequate to ensure jobs, prevent unemployment, and cover new social risks. Trapped between Member States’ common need to confront these developments and their individual power claims, the European Union (EU) has relied on the institutionalization of instruments such as benchmarking, peer review, and exchange of best practices within the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) and the European Employment Strategy (EES). In recent years, Germany, France, and Italy have undertaken at least attempted extensive reforms, aiming at a more empowering and integrative employment and welfare regime. These reforms coincide in many aspects with the demands of the EES and OMC/Inclusion (cf. Radaelli 2003: 50) but differ considerably in extent and reform area (cf. Zeitlin and Pochet 2005, Serrano Pascual and Magnusson 2007). So how can we explain these similarities and differences? We argue that in order to answer this question we need a better understanding of the domestic processes of appropriation. Previous works have conceived the EES as a transnational learning process between European governments (Jacobsson and Vifell 2007) or examined the institutional effects of OMC processes (López-Santana 2006). We argue that while comparative scholars of national models tend to overemphasize institutional continuity (Streeck and Thelen 2005), many researchers on European integration tend to underestimate the stickiness of domestic institutions. We aim to avoid both pitfalls by introducing an intermediate level of organizations interacting within a domestic social field (cf. DiMaggio and Powell 1983, Fligstein 2001). Their actions thus refer to both domestic institutions and experiences from European learning fora (cf. Heidenreich and Bischoff 2008). The ideas, policy examples, and financial incentives of the OMC processes and supporting programmes provide an additional resource for such domestic practices (cf. Giddens 1984). The actors appropriating these resources have interpreted them according to the established
institutional structure and their own preferences. We argue that the form and extent of domestic appropriation thus depends on two conditions: the respective design of the OMC process, and the ideas, interests, and strategic positions of the mediating actors in the domestic field. Hence in this chapter we seek to test two hypotheses:
1 the different design of OMC processes has significant effects on the course and outcomes of domestic reforms;
2 national institutions nonetheless guide domestic appropriation.
