EU Value Champions? EU Leaders and the Promotion of Article 2 TEU Values

The Lisbon-amended Treaty on European Union (TEU) establishes EU values and charges EU actors with promoting those values. “The Union,” Article 2 TEU proclaims, “is founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities.” “These values,” Article 2 continues, “are common to the Member States in a society in which pluralism, non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity and equality between women and men prevail.” Article 3 TEU identifies value promotion as one of the EU’s three aims and charges EU actors with promoting EU values abroad, and Article 7 TEU establishes a process for safeguarding EU values at home. While Articles 2, 3, and 7 have received significant scholarly attention (e.g., Bárd et al. 2025; Blauberger and van Hüllen 2021; Foret and Calligaro 2018; Scheppele and Kochenov 2020; Scheppele and Morijn 2025; Wouters 2020), this paper pays attention to a charge that comes out of Article 13 TEU. That article establishes that “the Union shall have an institutional framework which shall aim to promote its values.” Do the leaders of EU leaders actually promote EU values? Do they champion all EU values equally? Do some institutions promote EU values more vigorously than others? What factors might explain variation leaders’ value advocacy? The paper addresses these questions through a text-as-data approach. It analyzes the texts of all public speeches delivered by the presidents of four EU institutions (European Parliament, European Council, European Commission, European Central Bank) between 2009 and 2025. It evaluates four sets of theoretically derived hypotheses. The first set relates to the values themselves (e.g., that leaders are more likely to promote the values identified in the first sentence of Article 2 TEU than the “prevailing phenomena” identified in Article 2’s second sentence). The second set relates to the functions of the institutions (e.g., that EP presidents will promote democracy particularly vigorously, while Commission presidents will promote the rule of law particularly vigorously). The third set relates to presidents’ social identities (e.g., that left-of-center leaders will vigorously promote equality, that women presidents will vigorously promote gender equality). And the fourth set relates to potential audience effects (e.g., that presidents will be more likely to promote EU values when they are speaking outside of the EU). Overall, the paper finds that EU leaders give little public attention to the values that purportedly form the Union’s backbone. Presidents are more likely to promote some values (freedom, democracy) than others (human dignity, human rights, equality, and—notably—the rule of law). EP presidents are much more consistent value champions than Commission, European Council, and ECB presidents. Overall, the leaders of the institutions are unreliable and inconsistent value champions. This fact that has significant implications given current continental and geopolitical contexts.