The domestic implications of European soft law: framing and transmitting change in employment policy

Abstract The Treaty of Amsterdam launched the European Employment Strategy, a supranational non-binding instrument to boost employment rates and competitiveness. The open method of coordination, a new governance regulatory instrument, rules this common strategy. The article argues that the ‘framing effect’ of soft law is significant to policy-making across states, especially in the case of policy formulation. The analysis is grounded in the argument that to understand the effect of ‘foreign’ non-binding governance instruments researchers studying these types of governance instruments should unpack the ‘black box of policy-making’ and focus on process. Specifically, the article contributes to the literature on Europeanization by studying an instance of ‘soft Europeanization.’ To sustain and illustrate my argument, I present data from interviews conducted in the European Union, in Sweden, Spain, and Belgium at the national and subnational levels.