Abstract
Assessments of the premierships of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, who have been seen as dominant leaders, corresponded with research in the past years which has argued that contemporary politics in liberal democracies has become increasingly personalised and that heads of government today have more power resources and autonomy than their predecessors, which gives them a larger capacity to act. But have a premier’s options to shape his government’s policies actually increased and made his leadership in the core executive more dominant? To contribute to this debate, the study at hand analyses the political leadership of the UK prime minister in European policy. In this chapter the current state of research and the aims, methods, data and structure of the study are set out.
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Notes
- 1.
Despite a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition from 2010 to 2015, the British first-past-the-post-electoral system has since 1945 tended to facilitate single party governments.
- 2.
Particularly under the Blair government there were changes in this respect as it furthered a process of devolution giving more political autonomy to the regions Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. But the British political system remains less federally structured than, for instance, the German one.
- 3.
‘Europe’ is, of course, strictly speaking not synonymous with ‘the EU’ or ‘the EC’. But in common jargon, and in this study as well, they are treated as if they were interchangeable.
- 4.
Heffernan (2005) compares the offices of British prime minister and US-President and concludes that the latter has to govern with more institutional constraints than the former.
- 5.
Moreover, when the thesis was submitted in 2003 the British government’s decision on joining the Eurozone was still pending so the case study for Blair could not be completed at the time.
- 6.
His memoirs were published after this study was completed.
- 7.
The BDOHP was initiated in 1995 and is available to the public through the Churchill Archives Centre at Churchill College, Cambridge (https://www.chu.cam.ac.uk/archives/collections/bdohp/, accessed 8 March 2018).
- 8.
The Independent was founded in the 1980s and therefore not used in the Callaghan case study.
- 9.
- 10.
For more on structuring with regard to content (‘inhaltliche Strukturierung’) see Mayring (2010: 98).
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Bujard, B. (2019). Prime Ministerial Political Leadership and British European Policy: An Introduction. In: The British Prime Minister in the Core Executive. Contributions to Political Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89953-4_1
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