European leaders have struggled to find common responses to the polycrisis the EU is facing. This crisis of leadership makes it urgent that scholars provide a better understanding of the role and impact of leadership in EU politics and policy making. This article prepares the ground for a collection of contributions that addresses this need by strengthening old and building new bridges between the academic domains of European studies and leadership studies. It opens with a discussion of the contested concept of leadership in the context of the European polity and politics, challenging the conventional view that leadership is necessarily a matter of hierarchy. Moreover, it argues that rather than leaderless, the EU is an intensely 'leaderful' polity. Subsequently, this introduction identifies four key debates in contemporary EU leadership research and discusses the value and insights the contributions in this special issue bring to these debates.

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The EU’s pluralistic, nonhierarchical system of multilevel governance lacks clear structures of both government and opposition. According to the EU treaties, the presidency of the European Commission is thus not explicitly expected to exercise political leadership. However, the position cannot effectively be exercised without any demonstration of such leadership due to its many leadership functions. Examining this curious mix of strong political demands, weak institutional powers, and need for political leadership, this book systematically analyzes the political leadership performance of the presidents of the European Commission throughout the process of European integration. The basic argument is that Commission presidents matter not only in the process of European integration, but that their impact varies according to how the different incumbents deal with the institutional structure and the situational circumstances, and thus their available strategic choices. The primary research question is thus: What makes political leadership in European governance successful and to what extent (and why) do Commission presidents differ in their leadership performance? In addressing this question, this book departs from existing research on EU leadership, which has to date often analyzed either the EU’s institutional structure and its potential for leadership or mainly focused on only the most recent incumbents in case study analyses. Focusing on the multiterm European Commission presidents Walter Hallstein, Jacques Delors, and José Manuel Barroso, this book conceptualizes their political leadership as a performance, and thus systematically analyzes their agenda-setting, mediative-institutional, and public outreach performance over the entire course of their presidential terms.

In recent decades, the governments of Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, especially the United Arab Emirates (UAE), have substantially increased their promotion of women in public life, with more women obtaining senior positions in an array of social domains. Despite these efforts, women’s leadership in the public sphere of GCC states still lags behind what has been achieved in other parts of the world. Focusing on the UAE, this article provides an overview of the current state and complex nature of women’s leadership in the Emirates. It examines who the UAE’s female leaders are, their socio-economic backgrounds, and the specific social arenas they most often obtain leadership positions in. The article utilizes a newly compiled data set on the socio-economic backgrounds of women who obtained leadership positions in the realms of politics, the economy, and society more broadly in the UAE between 1970 and 2017.

Collaborative leadership has stood at the heart of European politics since its inception. Yet EU scholars have only recently started to examine the concept and mainly from an institutional perspective. This article conceptualises the phenomenon of collaborative leadership from an actor-centered perspective. It explores a central condition for successful collaborative leadership identified in the literature: the existence of shared beliefs among the leaders involved. To do this, the article focuses on four events in the history of European Economic and Monetary Union. Using the method of cognitive mapping, the study establishes the extent of congruence in the beliefs on European integration and fiscal and monetary policy of the four leadership trios overseeing these events. On the basis of a survey of leading experts in the field, the article reveals that the level of cognitive proximity in leaders' beliefs aligns with the perceived success with which the trios exerted collaborative leadership.

This chapter provides a systematic overview of the office of Commission president, introducing the office’s political leadership demands, institutional structure, and situational setting and how these have developed over time. The chapter argues that the institutional-situational environment of the Commission presidency has remained relatively weak and unpredictable concerning the provision of political leadership, meaning that neither variable provides resources that reliably exceed the office’s many constraints. The chapter then turns to the variable of personal (pre-)dispositions, explaining the grounds of comparability on which the three case studies, Walter Hallstein, Jacques Delors and José Manuel Barroso, have been selected and summarizing their career backgrounds and relevant political attributes. The conclusion sets forth the basic argument of the study—that if the institutional structure and the situational setting are weak and unstable, personal (pre-)dispositions predominantly influence the provision of political leadership, and therefore substantially shape patterns of political leadership performance.

<p>This thematic issue provides the first comprehensive overview of women opposition leaders and their performance. Setting the stage for a new research agenda, this editorial piece integrates theoretical and empirical insights at the intersection of three distinct research areas: political opposition, political leadership, and gender and politics. It discusses various notions of opposition leaders and identifies three main lines of inquiry: (a) career pathways and trajectories, (b) patterns of selection and de-selection, and (c) the actual and perceived performance of women’s oppositional leadership. Applying a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches, this collection of original articles captures the diversity of women opposition leaders, their career trajectories, and their exercise of leadership across different political regimes and world regions.</p>