Studying Political Leadership in European Governance

This chapter presents the analytical framework for studying the political leadership performance of EU Commission presidents. First, it clarifies why European integration theories have proved insufficient in explaining the actual impact and performance of the presidents of the European Commission. Second, it conceptualizes political leadership as a behavioral phenomenon within the field of social interaction and relates it to European governance. Third, it introduces the interactionist approach to analyzing political leadership, focusing on its central variables: (1) personal (pre-)dispositions, (2) institutional structure, and (3) situational setting. Moreover, it develops a typology of patterns of leadership performance and a functional-phases/variable model to operationalize leadership analysis of the Commission presidency. Fourth and finally, it presents the research strategy, encompassing a structured, focused comparison alongside systematic content and discourse analyses for each case under study.

Introduction

The introduction lays out the relevance of the research topic—the political leadership of the president of the EU Commission. Explicating the empirical puzzle—the office’s peculiar combination of strong political demands, weak institutional powers, and potential for strong political leadership—it poses the operational research question: What makes political leadership in supranational governance successful and to what extent (and why) do Commission presidents differ in their leadership performance? A brief review of the literature on the European Commission presidency accompanies a survey of core themes in the study of political leadership, in particular beyond national constituencies. Finally, the introduction presents the research design and data set as well as the study’s main findings, and outlines how the rest of the book is structured.

Mapping the Presidency of the European Commission

This chapter provides a systematic overview of the office of Commission president, introducing the office’s political leadership demands, institutional structure, and situational setting and how these have developed over time. The chapter argues that the institutional-situational environment of the Commission presidency has remained relatively weak and unpredictable concerning the provision of political leadership, meaning that neither variable provides resources that reliably exceed the office’s many constraints. The chapter then turns to the variable of personal (pre-)dispositions, explaining the grounds of comparability on which the three case studies, Walter Hallstein, Jacques Delors and José Manuel Barroso, have been selected and summarizing their career backgrounds and relevant political attributes. The conclusion sets forth the basic argument of the study—that if the institutional structure and the situational setting are weak and unstable, personal (pre-)dispositions predominantly influence the provision of political leadership, and therefore substantially shape patterns of political leadership performance.

Conclusion

The conclusion offers a summary of the main theoretical and empirical insights this book has produced. The empirical findings confirm the study’s basic argument that weak institutional powers and an unreliable situational setting presuppose a stronger dependence on the incumbent’s personal capacities and (pre-)dispositions to successfully address the office’s leadership demands. A comprehensive assessment of the political leadership performance of the three Commission presidents Walter Hallstein, Jacques Delors, and José Manuel Barroso, concerning their agenda-setting leadership, mediative-institutional leadership, and public leadership, finds that Hallstein’s leadership performance was moderately strong-executive, Delors’ was strong-entrepreneurial, and Barroso’s was weak-passive/non-leadership. A preliminary evaluation of the leadership performance of Jean-Claude Juncker, Commission president between 2014 and 2019, follows. Finally, there is a plea to substantially strengthen the institutional powers of the Commission presidency to make it less dependent on individual agency and incumbents’ personal (pre-)dispositions.

The Audience

Politics is not a business exclusively conducted “behind closed doors,” so any comprehensive analysis of political leadership needs to take into account leaders’ public performance. This chapter examines the public leadership performance of the Commission presidents Walter Hallstein, Jacques Delors, and José Manuel Barroso. Based on the theory of candidate–media agenda convergence, performance of public leadership is considered strong when a leader is not only visible in the media but when his or her political agenda and issue frames are accepted by the media and overlap with the topics with which he or she is associated. The analysis thus focuses on the media’s attention allocation to the presidents’ political agendas and the tone of the reporting, assessing it as positive, neutral, or negative. The analysis is based on one print medium, the British Financial Times, encompassing 536 articles between 1958 and 2014 that directly cover each president under study.

Backstage

The aim of this chapter is to shed light on the informal realm of European deliberation and decision-making and the role the Commission presidency plays in it. The Commission presidency occupies a unique intermediary position within the institutional system of the European Union, as the only office that participates in the four European-level policymaking arenas—the College of Commissioners, the European Council, the Council of Ministers, and the European Parliament. Mediative-institutional leadership encompasses the capacity to build consensus in the different decision-making arenas of the European Union as well as managing and guiding the Commission’s work effectively. The chapter analyzes the performance of institutional mediation of three Commission presidents, Walter Hallstein, Jacques Delors, and José Manuel Barroso. The study is based on twenty-nine semi-structured expert interviews as well as fourteen interviews conducted by the Oral History Program of the Historical Archives of the European Union.

Onstage

This chapter conducts a systematic comparison of the agenda-setting performance of three Commission presidents, Walter Hallstein (1958–67), Jacques Delors (1985–95), and José Manuel Barroso (2004–14). Since the Commissionis vested with the right of initiative at the EU level, influencing and shaping the EU’s agenda is one of the Commission president’s primary political functions. The chapter first focuses on the preference setting of topics, that is, when did Commission presidents announce their agendas, which were their main political topics, where were their speeches delivered, and how did their issue attention develop over time. Next, speeches delivered in the European Parliament are analyzed in terms of issue framing and rhetorical strategies to understand why particular topics made it onto the president’s agenda. The analysis is enabled through systematic content and discourse analyses, making use of a total of 1,177 public and semi-public speeches of the three presidents under study.