Tracing leadership: the ECB’s ‘whatever it takes’ and Germany in the Ukraine crisis

Abstract

Political scientists face problems when assessing a leader’s impact: how can we know that a policy outcome or institutional change is caused by leadership? This article argues that in addition to relying on comparisons and counterfactuals, we need to trace the causal mechanisms by which leadership affects outcomes. Therefore, the article proposes a way to trace leadership and applies it to two cases of EU crisis management: the European Central Bank’s role in announcing Outright Monetary Transactions in the eurozone crisis, and Germany’s role in shaping the EU’s response to the Ukraine crisis. Systematic process-tracing shows that both actors provided leadership ‘by default’. However, while the ECB had to combine the provision of knowledge with unilateral action in order to overcome the eurozone crisis, Germany could use manifold bargaining-based strategies and thus became the EU’s de facto agenda setter and main representative in managing the Ukraine crisis.

Keywords:

• Leadership
• process-tracing
• causal mechanism
• European Union
• eurozone crisis
• Ukraine crisis

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Femke van Esch and Henriette Müller for their valuable feedback on earlier versions of the article. Moreover, I am indebted to Tobias Bunde and Wilfried Jilge for very informative background talks on the Ukraine crisis, and I am grateful for constructive comments provided by the participants of the ECPR Joint Sessions workshop on ‘Leadership in EU Politics and Policy-Making’ (Nicosia 2018) as well as three anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 ‘Collective action problem’ refers to a situation in which everyone would be better off cooperating but diverging interests make cooperation fail.

2 For an overview, see https://europa.eu/newsroom/highlights/special-coverage/eu-sanctions-against-russia-over-ukraine-crisis_en (accessed 27 August 2018).

3 Translated by the author.

4 Translated by the author.

5 Translated by the author.

6 Original: ‘ausgleichend’.

7 Original: ‘vermittelnd’.

8 Original: ‘treibende Kraft’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Magnus G. Schoeller

Magnus G. Schoeller is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for European Integration Research (EIF), Department of Political Science, University of Vienna. He is the author of Leadership in the Eurozone and a co-author of European Parliament Ascendant (both Palgrave Macmillan 2019). His articles have appeared in journals such as the Journal of European Public Policy or the Journal of Common Market Studies. [[email protected]]