Skipping the Foundations: How the European Union Leapt to Reflexive Leadership Without Building Participative Leadership — Consequences for Legitimacy, Inclusion, and Governance Capacity

This conceptual paper examines the evolution of leadership practices within the European Union (EU), arguing that the Union prematurely institutionalised reflexive leadership before establishing the necessary foundations of participative leadership. Drawing on public management, collaborative governance, and reflexive governance literatures, the paper distinguishes analytically between participative and reflexive leadership, demonstrating their interdependence and the normative significance of their sequencing. Participative leadership centres on inclusion, empowerment, and shared influence, mobilising diverse publics in agenda-setting and collective decision-making. Reflexive leadership, by contrast, is concerned with second-order learning, institutional self-examination, and the revision of governance frameworks in response to uncertainty and complexity. While both leadership forms offer distinctive advantages, the paper contends that reflexive leadership presupposes participative leadership for normative, epistemic, and structural reasons. Through a conceptual reconstruction and three empirical illustrations—the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI), the Better Regulation agenda, and the Conference on the Future of Europe (CoFoE)—the paper shows that EU participatory instruments have largely produced participation without power, while reflexive mechanisms have generated learning without democracy. The ECI illustrates how structural design hurdles and discretionary institutional responses generate symbolic participation rather than genuine citizen influence. Better Regulation demonstrates how consultations feed into technocratic evaluation and policy scrutiny rather than deliberation or agenda-setting. CoFoE, although more deliberative, remained structurally nested within institutional reflexivity rather than participative empowerment, with follow-up dominated by expert filtering and interinstitutional bargaining. The paper identifies advantages of reflexive leadership, including increased procedural coherence, enhanced internal learning, anticipatory capacity, and resilience to complexity. However, it also highlights disadvantages, including technocratic dominance, epistemic narrowness, legitimacy shortfalls, asymmetric access favouring organised interests, and symbolic openness without democratic empowerment. Conversely, participative leadership enhances input legitimacy, epistemic diversity, deliberative quality, and social ownership of, but carries disadvantages such as reduced efficiency, participatory fatigue, and resource-driven inequalities among stakeholders. The central contribution of this paper lies in reconceptualising the EU’s governance evolution as an inverted sequencing: reflexive leadership developed not after participative leadership, as theory would predict, but before it. This inversion produced interlocking legitimacy, learning, and governance deficits. The paper concludes that the EU cannot correct these deficits by expanding reflexive instruments alone. Instead, it must retroactively construct participative leadership, including deliberative infrastructures, agenda-setting mechanisms, transparent follow-up, and strengthened civil society capacity. Only by rebalancing participative and reflexive leadership can the EU achieve governance that is simultaneously democratic, epistemically rich, and institutionally adaptive.