Explaining Political Leadership: Germany's Role in Shaping the Fiscal Compact
| Author | Magnus G. Schoeller |
| Date | 01 September 2015 |
| Published date | 01 September 2015 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12243 |
Explaining Political Leadership: Germany’s
Role in Shaping the Fiscal Compact
Magnus G. Schoeller
European University Institute, Florence
Abstract
This article examines why and how political leaders emerge and, once in charge, what determines their success or fail-
ure. To explore these questions, I present a theory of political leadership that takes into account both the structural
and the behavioral aspects of the concept. I argue that the emergence and the impact of leadership represent two dif-
ferent analytical steps. A leader emerges if there is a supply of, and demand for, leadership. While the supply depends
on a leader’s expected benefits, the demand is determined by the followers’status quo costs. The second step con-
cerns a leader’s impact, which results from the strategies deployed by the leader. While a leader’s capacity to employ
strategies is determined by the power resources at its disposal, the intensity of strategies needed to influence out-
comes depends on the heterogeneity of preferences and on the adaptability of the institutional setting. The theory is
applied in the context of the current eurozone crisis by analyzing Germany’s role in shaping the European Fiscal
Compact.
Despite a large volume of literature, research on political
leadership (PL) is ‘disparate, under-theorised and under-
researched’(Hartley and Benington, 2011, p. 211). Rather
than a comprehensive political science theory of leader-
ship, we find a large variety of idiosyncratic approaches
that are essay-like, focus on highly specific aspects or are
purely biographical narratives (Peele, 2005). Against this
backdrop, it is my aim to elaborate a general
1
theory of
PL. In so doing, I introduce a crucial analytical distinction
between the emergence of leadership on the one hand,
and its impact on political outcomes on the other. Thus,
the central questions are:
1. Why and how do political leaders emerge?
2. How do political leaders manage to influence out-
comes? What determines their success or failure?
To assess the plausibility of the resulting theory I will
apply it to a first empirical case, namely Germany’s role
in shaping the European Fiscal Compact.
In line with the general aim of this special issue (see the
introductory article), my theoretical contribution is to com-
bine the disparate insights gained in the field of leadership
research with proper political science theorizing. The
empirical added value results from this article’s focus on
the European Fiscal Compact, which is an important step
among the various anticrisis measures but has been widely
neglected by the relevant literature so far. While the first
part of this article serves to develop the theory, the second
is dedicated to the empirical case study. In the conclusions,
I summarize and evaluate the results.
A theory of political leadership
In this section, I develop a theory of PL that is based on
a‘soft’version of rational institutionalism. I thereby aim
at addressing exactly those theoretical gaps that have
been identified by one of the current experts in the field:
There is [...] an even more urgent need to inte-
grate the leadership factor into both rational
choice analysis and the ‘new’institutionalism. In
terms of the former, to what extent does leader-
ship affect preference formation and the articula-
tion and definition of political choices? In terms
of the latter, to what degree does leadership
affect the creation of institutions and the process
of institutional change? (Elgie, 2001, p. 8579)
Conceptual clarifications
The existing definitions of PL are numerous.
2
However,
almost all of them are based on at least one of the fol-
lowing three elements.
Firstly guidance, understood as the exertion of a deter-
mining influence on a group’s behavior. This implies that
©2015 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Global Policy (2015) 6:3 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12243
Global Policy Volume 6 . Issue 3 . September 2015
256
Special Section Article
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