Festschrift für Fritz W. Scharpf - MPIfG

V. Schmidt · The Boundaries of “Bounded Generalizations” 343
of Ministers and debates in the European Parliament, comes closest to national
multi-actor systems in the wide range of policy actors who negotiate
the construction of policy programs through an elaborate coordinative discourse
which tends to be contractual in tone and cooperative in tenor. 8 The
process by which ideas inform the coordinative discourse, moreover, is as
open as in multi-actor systems to epistemic communities (Mazey/Richardson
l996; Kohler-Koch 1997: 99–101), advocacy coalitions (Sabatier l998),
and policy entrepreneurs, not just for the Single Market and EMU, as noted
earlier, but for a wide range of other issues as well, including agriculture
(Fouilleux 2001).
The European Union’s coordinative discourse, however, is complicated
by the fact that it is multi-level (see Kohler-Koch 1996; Marks et al. 1996)
as well as multi-actor, with many of its policy actors also engaged in national
coordinative discourses and many of its ideas those of experts who
also operate in national discursive policy communities. The picture is even
more complex than this, however, since the pattern of multi-level discursive
interaction departs more from traditional single-actor patterns than from
multi-actor ones (see Figure 4). For while national multi-actor systems tend
to experience little more than the addition of another level of coordinative
discourse (compare Figure 4 with Figure 3), national single-actor systems
experience greater disruption. This is because in single-actor systems, members
of discursive policy communities and even of the informed public may
become players in the EU level coordinative discourse even though they
may continue to be excluded from the coordinative discourse at the national
level (contrast Figure 4 with Figure 2), while the government has to communicate
EU decisions to the public, risking an adversarial reaction, rather
than working out the implementation in cooperation with the most affected
interests, as in multi-actor systems. In France, for example, the impact can
be seen in the wide range of policy sectors where business has become a
partner of government at the EU level even though at the national level government
still maintains its traditional distance (Schmidt l996, l999c). And it
also can be seen in its difficulties in working out the details of implementing
EU level decisions in public services sectors such as electricity by contrast
with Germany (Eising/Jabko 2002; Schmidt 2001b).
8 There is no room here to go into the subtleties of the three modes of decision-making
Scharpf identifies as typical of the EU: joint decision-making, intergovernmental agreements,
and supranational centralization (see Scharpf 2002). The discussion here best fits
the joint decision-making process.