The Role of Leadership in EU Politics and Policy-making: The Value of Theoretical and Methodological Cross-fertilization

Abstract

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 these challenges that increasingly require transboundary, collective and determined leadership. The field of European studies, however, is predominantly institutional in nature and often neglects the impact of agency. Conversely, most leadership studies focus on the (sub-)national level and have yet to apply their ideas to European governance. While many single case studies of the actions and impacts of European leaders exist, there have only been few theoretically guided, comparative or large N-studies of the role of leadership in EU politics and policy-making (Van Esch & Swinkels 2015, Müller 2016). This panel brings together experts on political leadership and EU governance to address the following questions: How do the formal and informal structures and practices of European politics affect the exertion of leadership – both individual and collective – at the national and supranational level? How do the behavior and characteristics of European leaders affect the process of European integration? How can we integrate the concept of leadership more systematically into the often institutionally driven theories of European integration? By addressing these questions, we aim to infuse EU studies with a more in-depth understanding of leadership, analyze the multifold implications of the EU system for exerting leadership and stimulate theoretically rigorous and methodologically comparative research in the study of European leadership.