Conceptualising the Impact of Leadership Selection in the European Union: Inter-institutional Relations, Party Politics and Public Legitimacy

The introduction of the Spitzenkandidaten process has sparked a rich debate on the implications for the EU electoral process. At the same time, limited focus has been devoted to how the appointment procedure affects the Presidency from the perspective of inter-institutional relations and public legitimacy, questions that have grown in saliency overall in the post-Lisbon era and the aftermath of the Eurozone crisis. The paper develops an analytical framework for assessing the impact of leadership appointment on the effectiveness of decision-making of the European Commission. The conceptualization aims to facilitate the systematic study of how leadership selection affects four critical dimensions of EU politics: the public perception of EU leadership, the nature of executive-legislative relations during the President’s mandate and throughout the policy process, the role of party politics in EU decision-making and balance of power between intergovernmental and supranational institutions. In doing so, the paper seeks to make two contributions: first, it provides a methodology for the empirical assessment of the impact of recent changes in the process of leadership selection. Second, it provides a timely addition to the wider, theoretical debate on the parliamentarisation of EU democracy and the future trajectory of the integration process.