Individuals Matter: The Impact of Beliefs and Leadership Styles on German Foreign Policy

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Klaus Brummer, since 7/2018
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: from 2016 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 288437573

Neither national nor international scholarship on German foreign policy devotes much attention to individual decision-makers. Rather, existing studies argue predominantly from institutional, liberal, or constructivist perspectives and focus on structural factors as explanatory variables. This is all the more surprising given the pre-eminent position of the German chancellor not least in the realm of foreign policy, as exemplified in Adenauer's policy of Western integration, Brandt's Ostpolitik, and Merkel's Euro rescue policy. One of the main reasons for this neglect of individual decision-makers in theory-driven analyses of German foreign policy is the unavailability of crucial methodological tools. Therefore, this project focuses on (a) the translation into German of internationally established coding schemes for the automated quantitative identification of leadership styles and political beliefs of decision-makers and (b) the empirical application of those coding schemes to German foreign policy. The main rationale of the project is to establish a link between empirical research on German foreign policy and two of the best-established approaches in the field of Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA). These approaches are the leadership trait approach (LT), which is used to investigate leadership styles, and the operational code approach (OC), which probes into the political beliefs of decision-makers. Both approaches allow a systematic, quantitative identification of the respective characteristics through an automated procedure. The latter is based on the content analysis programme Profiler Plus. However, this programme can so far only code English language texts. Thus, the added value of this research project in methodological terms comes from the translation into German of the coding schemes embedded into Profiler Plus. The added empirical value is in complementing the existing, predominantly descriptive accounts of leadership styles and political beliefs of German foreign policy decision-makers (the project covers all German chancellors and foreign ministers since 1949) with more rigorous, systematic, and computer-based insights that are derived by using well-established analytical approaches. Within the framework of two research designs, the project will lead to valid comparative insights on the impact of leadership styles and political beliefs on German foreign policy. The first research design establishes the autonomy of leadership styles and political beliefs vis-à-vis structural variables. The second design explores the explanatory power of leadership styles and political beliefs for two distinct issue areas within the realm of foreign policy (European policy, foreign deployments of the German armed forces). In order to increase the robustness of these findings, the project systematically takes into account possible alternative explanations such as parties or societal norms.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Ehemaliger Antragsteller: Dr. Mischa Hansel, until 6/2018