The Role of Leadership in EU Politics and Policy-Making: Moving Towards Theoretical Integration and Methodological Cross-Fertilization

Recent crises have shown that the EU has entered an era of transformation. Facing a rise in nationalism and with the legitimacy of the EU’s founding institutions at stake, European leaders are struggling to find common responses to the challenges that increasingly require transboundary, collective and determined leadership. While the declining level of public trust affects politics in general, it appears that political leaders of the European Union and their decision-making have notably suffered from this decline. At the same time, the EU increasingly faces problems of a global scale in the areas of the environment, economics, security and migration that require collective European and determined leadership. These developments lead to an inherent tension between the need for determined leadership and democratic legitimacy and have led several observers to conclude that the EU is suffering from a leadership crisis (Cramme, 2011; Hayward, 2008, McNamara, 2010; Schild, 2013; cf. Van Esch, 2017; Westfall, 2013). This European leadership crisis creates new urgency for scholars of leadership research and EU studies to share their knowledge and thoroughly investigate European leadership in order to provide a better understanding of the role of leadership in EU politics and policy-making. This is not an easy task as the field of European studies has long been predominantly institutional in nature and has often neglected to study the role of agency (Bulmer & Joseph, 2016). Conversely, most leadership and elite studies focus predominantly on the (sub)national level and have yet to test and apply their ideas in a context of transnational and multi-level politics and policy-making like the European Union (Barber, 1998; Bennister et al., 2014; Haslam et al., 2011; Kane & Patapan, 2012). Spurred on by recent European crises the role of leadership is now gaining traction in EU studies (Cramme, 2011; Hayward 2008; Helms, 2017; Müller, 2016; Schoeller, 2016; Van Esch & Swinkels, 2015; Van Esch, 2017; Tӧmmel & Verdun, 2017). This work is, however, only in the early stages of a truly integrated approach on European leadership. We highlight two reasons for this gap in the literature on European leadership: On the one hand, much of the emergent work on leadership in European studies tends to apply insights from leadership and elite studies only cursorily to cases of European leadership and does not employ the full theoretical and/or methodological state of the art that the domain of leadership and elite studies can offer. Hence, a lot of research on European leadership that has been conducted consists of single case studies into the actions and impacts of key members of the European elite, of the EU’s institutional negotiating and leadership structures, or offer comparative analyses of most recent EU political figureheads (Ross, 1995; Endo, 1999; Cini, 2008; Tallberg, 2006; Drake, 2000; Kassim et al., 2013; Schild, 2013; Tömmel, 2013; Brummer, 2014; van Esch, 2017). Although these studies offer many interesting and important insights, the research into European leadership could benefit from more structured comparative or large N-studies to provide a more general understanding of the role of leadership in EU politics and policy-making (cf. Van Esch & Swinkels, 2015; Müller, 2016). On the other hand, while several scholars in the domain of elites and leadership research are discovering that the complex transnational political system of the European Union makes for a particularly interesting domain, currently, many studies are simply testing the hypotheses derived from research and theory of (sub)national leadership and apply it one on one on the European leadership domain (Brummer, 2014; Tӧmmel, 2013; Van Esch & Swinkels, 2015). As such, they are ignoring the different dynamics and concerns regarding effectivity, democratic legitimacy, policy-making, sovereignty and collaborative leadership at play at the EU transnational level (but see Van Esch, 2017; Bulmer and Joseph, 2016). All in all, while there is an increasing acknowledgment for the value of cross-fertilization in the domains of leadership and of European studies, no true theoretical integration of the concept and theories of leadership and European Studies has taken place. The first contribution our workshop aims to make is therefore to bring together scholars of leadership and elite as well as European to make a first substantial effort to fill this caveat in the literature on European leadership, and to work towards truly integrating theories of leadership and European studies. The second, and related, contribution our workshop aims to make is to promote methodological cross-fertilization. In order to corresponds with (the newly developed) theoretical expectations, scholars will need sophisticated methodological tools and designs. Several aspects of leadership, as well as its potential impact on political processes and policy-making are notoriously hard to measure and often requires specific tools, methods and research designs (Northouse, 2015). Both European and elites and leadership studies, offer their own methodological tools and techniques, which, if brought together systematically, provide for a substantial fertilization of both domains. For example, leadership/elite studies offers ways of measuring beliefs, leadership style, personality, and leadership capital in a comparative analysis. EU studies offers experience in how to analyse the multi-level EU policy cycle from agenda-setting to modes of decision-making, has a strong focus on political legitimacy, and offers methods to establish the impact different political actors (EU interest groups, citizens, politicians, governments etc.) have on the political and policy-making processes at the European level. With our workshop, we therefore also aim to stimulate methodological cross-fertilization and a discussion on the value-added of different methods. Hence, our workshop will provide scholars with the best methodological tools available to determine the role of leadership in EU politics and policy-making. As the study of European leadership is in its early stages of research, we take a broad view of the concept of European leadership and invite papers studying the role of leadership and elites both at the EU level within EU institutions, as well as the member state level. We are particularly interested in comparative approaches and, specifically, would like to invite scholars that apply specific methodologies to assess (aspects of) leadership (i.e. leadership trait analysis, leadership capital index, operational code, discourse and content analysis, delphi technique) as well as ways to assess its influence on politics and policy-making separately from other (contextual or institutional) influences (process-tracing, quantitative research, QCA, network analysis, among others). In doing so, we would like to address two broad central questions: • What is the role and impact of leadership in EU politics and policy-making, given its particular multi-level nature, and how can we explain this? • How do we analyse and measure how leadership the execution and impact of various aspects of leadership in a transboundary European context? At a more specific level, this raises theoretical questions like: How can we integrate the concept of leadership more systematically into the often institutionally driven theories of European integration? To what extent does the multi-level EU system enable and constrain the actions and impact of leaders (‘t Hart, 2015)? How can leaders overcome the tensions between effective and legitimate leadership in a democratic political system consisting of sovereign states (Barber, 1998; Kane & Patapan, 2012; Teles, 2015), and can the concept of ‘collaborative leadership’ play a role in this? How do the informal structures and practices of European politics affect the exertion of leadership at the national and supranational level (Kleine, 2013; Nasshoven, 2011; Tallberg, 2006; Stäglich, 2007)? In methodological terms, the issue of how to measure leaders’ behaviour, characteristics (style, personality, beliefs, motives) and their legitimacy or capital separate from the impact or outcome thereof is crucial. As such, we are particularly interested in papers that use methodological techniques that were specifically developed for this (i.e. leadership trait analysis, leadership capital index, operational code, discourse analysis, delphi technique). However, to answer our core questions it is equally important to establish to what extent leadership – rather than other factors - affect European integration, politics and policy-making (Müller, 2016). We therefore also like to explicitly invite scholars using methods aimed at establishing the impact of leadership separate from other (contextual or institutional) influences (process-tracing, quantitative research, QCA, network analysis). By focussing the workshop on these two core questions, we aim to infuse EU studies with a more in-depth understanding of leadership by stimulating an integrated approach to EU leadership that takes into account both the effect of the particularities of the EU system on leadership, and vice versa. Moreover, by discussing the potential for methodological cross-fertilization, we aim to offer scholars in the field an expanded set of methodological tools, as well as stimulate rigorous and comparative research in the study of European leadership. We aim to use the joint session as the start of a collaborative effort towards a handbook/special issue on European leadership. References Barber, B.R. 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