Tracing Leadership: How a leader’s strategies translate into impact and the case of “whatever it takes”

Regardless of whether we study individual or collective actors, there is little doubt that leadership matters in politics. However, political scientists still face the problem of determining a leader’s impact on policy or institutional change. This problem regards both the conceptualization as well as the assessment of a leader’s impact: How can we know that a given policy outcome or institutional change is really caused by the leadership of a particular actor? In this paper, I argue that comparisons or counterfactuals cannot solve this problem in a satisfactory manner. In addition, we need to study the causal mechanisms by which leadership affects outcomes. The appropriate method for doing so is process-tracing. Starting from the proposition that a leader wields influence by translating power resources into particular strategies, I suggest a way to conceptualize and trace these leadership strategies. Furthermore, I illustrate the added value of this approach by applying it to EU policy-making: I analyse the leadership strategies employed by the European Central Bank (ECB) when announcing the so-called Outright Monetary Transactions and thereby suspending the eurozone crisis. The paper thus suggests a fruitful way of combining leadership studies with European integration research, and it sheds light on the strategies used by the ECB in combatting the eurozone crisis.