The OMC and national institutional capabilities : the Italian experience as a heuristic case study

This paper assesses the impact of the European Union’s Open Method of Coordination (OMC) on Italy’s institutional capability in the employment and social inclusion policy fields. Institutional capability is defined as the extent to which a system of collective action is able – by means of interactive dynamics – to elaborate ‘satisficing’ responses to environmental challenges; transform such responses into decisions of a political nature; implement such decisions; and learn from experience. Both in employment and social inclusion, Italy has suffered from a twofold handicap: initial congruence of its policymaking process with that presupposed by the OMC was low in both fields, and there have been internal dynamics of change which have significantly interacted with the push related to the OMC. However, the evidence provided in the paper points towards a clear strengthening of institutional capability as an OMC-induced effect in the employment field, while the OMC seems to have had little – if any – impact on institutional capability in the social assistance field. This variance is put to work in order to identify clusters of factors that have plausibly affected the impact of the OMC on Italy’s institutional capability, and could be exploited to generate general hypotheses about the impact of the OMC on national institutional capabilities