Determinants of Political Leaders’ Belief Change. The Case of the Eurozone Crisis

Research in leadership studies shows that the beliefs of political leaders affect politics and policy making. Moreover, the level of flexibility of leaders’ beliefs influences the likeliness that leaders are able to come to collective decisions. The Eurozone crisis provides an interesting case to study the propensity for belief change of high political leaders as previous research shows that 1) belief changes did indeed take place at the leadership level during the Eurozone crisis and 2) different leaders showed different patterns of belief change. Although these dynamic patterns of belief change help explain why management of the Eurozone crisis was difficult, it raises the question as to the causes of these different patterns of belief change. The aim of this paper is to increase our understanding of these causes by integrating insights in belief change derived from leadership studies and insights in the workings of European integration from European integration theories. The paper tests three hypotheses regarding the causes of belief change derived from three major theories of European integration. The first is derived from post-functionalist theory and posits that the level of Euroscepticism in country of origin may influence leaders’ propensity for belief change. The second is derived from the domestic politics approach to European integration and posits that national institutional constraints influences the likeliness leaders will change their beliefs. The third is derived from liberal intergovernmentalism and tests the influence of (changing) national economic interests on belief change. Eurobarometer data on Euroscepticism, data on political systems from the Database of Political Institutions (DPI) and Eurostat data on interest rates will be used to establish the three independent variables. This data is correlated to previous data from a Comparative Cognitive Mapping analysis of twelve political leaders during the Eurozone crisis between 2009-2015 that reveals their patterns of belief change.