Even more so than the United States, the European Union (EU) marks a classic case of an ‘anti-leadership environment’ designed to hinder rather than facilitate political leadership. While there have been, nevertheless, manifestations of leadership since the very beginning of European integration, the enigmatic features of leadership at the European level, and the specific difficulties in getting hold of the subject, have limited more systematic political research in this field. This article seeks to relate some of the perennial questions of political leadership research to the study of transnational European governance. Such an inquiry suggests that, in light of the recent changes in the conceptualization of leadership to be found in the wider literature, the empirical features of collective and dispersed leadership in the EU have gradually lost their peculiarity. This notwithstanding, the EU continues to have both a leadership and a followership problem, and the challenges ahead are unlikely to be overcome by institutional adaptation and reform alone.

Although still in its early phases, the Juncker Commission has already broken new ground. Not only is Jean-Claude Juncker the first Commission President to be selected by the Spitzenkandidaten process, an extra-constitutional system that has reconfigured the European Union’s institutional balance, but he has transformed the structure and operation of the College with the aim of creating a more political, and therefore more effective, Commission, and made good – so far – on his promise ‘to do better on the bigger things and be small on the small things’. This article examines this three-fold transformation. It looks at the innovations and change associated with the Juncker Commission. It considers what motivated them and how they were achieved, sets them in historical perspective, and discusses their implications for the institutions and for the European Union more broadly.

Observers of the European Union (EU) agree that it suffers from a leadership crisis. However, diagnoses of the precise nature of this crisis vary: some lament the lack of strong, visionary leaders, while others argue that the EU suffers from too much elite leadership. This article takes issue with both diagnoses and argues that the root of Europe’s leadership crisis lies in the misfit between the nature of EU leadership and the legitimating logic it is rooted in. All leadership implies inequality and therefore requires solid justification especially in the democratic European context. However, at the European level, the vectors of legitimacy that provide such justification are weak and contradictory, thereby tempting leaders to overstep the level of justification bestowed on them. Making use of ideological and identity leadership may help European leaders overcome the misfit between leadership and legitimacy that lies at the root of the leadership crisis.

This article explores the connection between time and political leadership within the institutional setting of the European Union (EU). The discussion first notes how time is linked to power, legitimacy and efficiency, and how time rules, time budgets and time horizons influence the potential for both institutional and individual leadership. Next, the article sets out core features of political time in the EU, discusses their implications for leadership and highlights the skilful handling of multiple times as a central leadership challenge. Leaders with larger, more predictable time budgets and more extended time horizons are in a privileged position as are those who enjoy discretion regarding the timing of their actions and who are able to act as time-setters. Increasingly, leaders in the supranational institutions of the EU – notably the Commission and the European Parliament – follow their own calendars. In the intergovernmental bodies, differences in executives’ time budgets and horizons affect their leadership potential.

Increasing attention is placed to redistributive attitudes, especially in the light of growing inequalities throughout the world. From Aristotle to Marx, the discipline classically shares a simple, albeit powerful assumption: individuals are mainly (or even only) motivated by their own self-interest. However, it is also assumed that alternative motivations may emerge as soon as the context allows this to happen. This article tests the impact of economic well-being at the societal level. Two main hypotheses are tested. First, the so-called ‘governmental protection hypothesis’, according to which support for redistribution declines at times of higher levels of national affluence. Second, the ‘declining self-interest hypothesis’, whereby national prosperity is expected to mitigate the income-based polarisation of redistributive preferences. While empirical evidence confirms the former, but not the latter, it also opens up a window of opportunity to develop an alternative theoretical explanation of attitude formation rooted in the social psychological literature.

Despite a growing interest in migration questions, it is still not possible to systematically analyse immigration policies across time and a large number of countries. Most studies in this field have heretofore focussed on individual cases. Recently, there have been a series of studies that have proposed policy indices that allow for large-N analyses. It appears, however, that these studies have not always adequately addressed the main challenges of index building, that is, conceptualisation, measurement and aggregation. Moreover, they are for the most part limited to individual policy fields or there is a trade-off between the number of countries and years that are covered. The aim of this article is to present the Immigration Policies in Comparison (IMPIC) project, which proposes a new and comprehensive way to measure immigration regulations. The data set covers all major fields and dimensions of immigration policies for thirty-three OECD countries between 1980 and 2010. This article discusses the way immigration policies have been conceptualised, how policies have been measured and aggregated and demonstrates the potential of such a new data set.

Active learning techniques tend to emphasize simulations, research projects, and the use of popular media to the relative neglect of problem-based approaches. This paper introduces a new problem-based exercise specifically for teaching international relations (IR) theories that builds on existing problem-based approaches by incorporating analogies and an exemplar-based approach to concept learning. Teaching complex IR theories to students, who are often early in their academic careers, can be a challenge for many academic staff. Our approach uses a carefully structured analogy, based on a dating scenario, to challenge students to explain and theorize the behaviour of the key actors in a way that is transferable to an IR analysis of state behaviour. The exercise yields an intuitive understanding of core theories that facilitates subsequent learning and application.