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

关于德国外交政策的国内和国际学术研究都不太关注决策者个人。相反，现有的研究主要从制度、自由主义或建构主义的角度进行论证，并将结构因素作为解释变量。考虑到这位德国总理在外交政策领域的卓越地位，尤其是在阿登纳的西方一体化政策、勃兰特的东方政策和默克尔的欧元救助政策中，这就更令人惊讶了。在理论驱动的德国外交政策分析中，忽视决策者个人的主要原因之一是缺乏关键的方法论工具。因此，本项目侧重于(a)将国际上建立的编码方案翻译成德语，用于自动定量识别决策者的领导风格和政治信仰，以及(b)将这些编码方案实证应用于德国外交政策。该项目的主要理由是在德国外交政策的实证研究与外交政策分析领域的两种最成熟的方法之间建立联系。这两种方法分别是研究领导风格的领导特质方法（LT）和研究决策者政治信仰的操作准则方法（OC）。这两种方法都允许通过自动化程序对各自的特征进行系统的、定量的识别。后者是基于内容分析程序Profiler Plus。然而，这个程序目前只能对英语文本进行编码。因此，该研究项目在方法学方面的附加价值来自于将嵌入Profiler Plus的编码方案翻译成德语。增加的经验价值在于补充现有的，主要是描述性的德国外交政策决策者的领导风格和政治信仰（该项目涵盖了自1949年以来所有德国总理和外交部长），通过使用成熟的分析方法获得更严格，系统和基于计算机的见解。在两个研究设计的框架内，该项目将对领导风格和政治信仰对德国外交政策的影响产生有效的比较见解。第一个研究设计建立了领导风格和政治信仰相对-à-vis结构变量的自主性。第二个设计探讨了领导风格和政治信仰对外交政策领域内两个不同问题领域（欧洲政策，德国武装部队的对外部署）的解释力。为了增加这些发现的稳健性，该项目系统地考虑了可能的替代解释，如政党或社会规范。

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.