Policy Coordination and Social Policy: From Voluntary and Progressive to Coercive Austerity

This paper sets out to trace how the OMC has developed from a voluntary policy coordination mechanism associated with a progressive reform agenda to a coercive mechanism associated with austerity. It aims, firstly, to shed light on the conditions under which the OMC’s progressive ideas were deployed, the mechanisms through which the OMC functioned, and yet, how few actual effects the OMC in social policy has had in member states. Secondly, it endeavors to analyse how this shifted in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The voluntary aspects of the OMC which have had little real lasting impacts in the 2000s have been transformed into new more coercive policy coordination processes with little legitimacy, but potentially much more impact.