Chameleonic Leadership Styles? The Case of Friedrich Merz

‘From vocal opposition leader to conciliatory chancellor’ (BR) or ‘Statesmanlike instead of belligerent’ (Tagesschau): Within a very short time, or more precisely, after the transition from opposition to government, public opinion attributed a change in style to Friedrich Merz. Shortly afterwards, a German newspaper (FAZ) headlined ‘Merz has found his role’, characterising him as an ‘Außenkanzler’. This characterisation is intended to emphasise leadership strength in foreign policy issues while subtly pointing to a lack of such strength in domestic policy issues. From a research perspective, the question arises as to whether different leadership styles are expressed simultaneously with regard to the aforementioned dimensions. While leadership styles are generally assumed to exhibit a high degree of stability, contemporary research indicates that they may vary across specific political situations (i.e. crisis leadership) and policy domains (i.e. experience or heightened interest in a particular political domain) – in other words: context matters. Further research is required to identify additional determinants of leadership styles and to develop a more nuanced understanding of their variations. While Bennister et al., for example, impressively demonstrate that a person's leadership capital can change over time, we want to focus not on the socialisation and learning process of the leader, but rather on the diversity of leadership capacities/styles at a given point in time. We operationalise these theoretical considerations along two dimensions: firstly, the leadership context manifests itself as the role that a leader fulfils and, secondly, as the arena in which leadership is actually exercised. With regard to role, we distinguish between opposition leadership and government leadership. While the opposition can generally represent comparatively homogeneous interests in the form of its own party programme, government leadership – especially in parliamentary democracies with coalition logic – is inherently heterogeneous due to a more complex institutional and political context, as well as the constellation of relevant actors. With regard to the arena, we distinguish between domestic and foreign policy leadership. A chancellor’s leadership style may vary across policy domains. Such variation might be driven by factors such as personal interests, prior expertise or the situational pressure in a given policy area. Building on these considerations, the proposed study pursues two objectives in selecting Friedrich Merz as a single case study. First, it seeks to address the two aforementioned research objectives. Dependent upon the findings, the study aims to motivate further case studies in order to place the analysis on a broader empirically grounded foundation. Second, it simultaneously provides a timely and systematic examination of Friedrich Merz’s leadership style across the aforementioned dimensions of leadership context. To identify Merz’s leadership style(s), we draw on Margaret G. Hermann’s Leadership Trait Analysis (LTA). This method enables the measurement of leadership traits and the resulting leadership styles through an “at-a-distance” approach based on spontaneous speech acts, which are collected and analysed across the respective roles and arenas.