The article examines artificial intelligence (AI) narratives of the three most important powers in the emerging global AI order – the US, China, and the EU. It argues that these narratives are central to constructing the meanings ascribed to AI in international politics and therefore to understanding the global competition for AI leadership. Specifically, the article uses a method of narrative analysis to reconstruct the AI narratives of the three powers from government documents and strategy papers. These narratives speak to the worldviews and AI images of the powers, how they view each other’s aspirations and behaviours, and what their objectives and motivations are to engage in AI competition. The relationship between the narratives sheds light on the scope for international AI cooperation and conflict. The results reinforce expectations of an intensifying ‘AI race’ between the US and China for global AI leadership. The EU comes out more as a bystander to this geopolitical competition, but strives to lead the development of international AI norms and standards. The article points to different potentials for cooperation and conflict on different aspects of AI and identifies status-seeking as a possible driver of AI competition.

Neurocognitive patterns in leadership shape employee behavior and organizational outcomes, offering important insights for advancing human resource management (HRM) theory and practice. Using a focused, theory-driven journal-based content analysis of ten high-ranked HRM and organizational journals, this review synthesizes neuroleadership research published between 2005 and 2025. The analysis is guided by six integrated neuroleadership themes (decision-making, emotional regulation, motivation and reward processing, social cognition, stress resilience, and attentional control) across six core HRM domains and interpreted through performance-oriented and sustainability-oriented HRM perspectives. The findings suggest that neuroleadership research predominantly emphasizes sustainability-oriented HRM, with decision-making and emotional–cognitive themes most frequently examined within learning and development, followed by employee engagement and well-being and organizational development. In contrast, performance-oriented HRM emphases, such as performance control and transactional management, receive comparatively less attention. The review highlights the need to expand research on motivation, stress resilience, and attentional control to address the demands of an increasingly digitalized workforce.

In contemporary politics, the rise of a leadership style centered on “gaslighting”—persuasion through systematic besmirching, belittling, and the inversion of shared norms—poses profound challenges to democracy. This essay traces the conceptual roots of gaslighting and its uptake as a style of leadership, explores its distinguishing features compared to other manipulative political tactics, and uses the current American situation (that is, the rhetoric of Donald Trump and JD Vance) alongside international examples to illustrate its consequences. Against this backdrop, “adaptive leadership” is advanced as a normative counterweight—one that invites honest engagement with adaptive challenges and bolsters civic trust. The contrast illuminates the stakes for democratic culture as gaslighting erodes the very fabric of orientation, accountability, and mutual respect. It is no exaggeration here to speak of a battle for the soul of democracy.

This article reconstructs the coming about of the 750 billion EU Covid Recovery Fund. We provide an embedded process‐tracing analysis of the dynamics from mid‐March 2020, when the idea of ‘Corona‐bonds’ was parachuted onto the Heads’ Agenda, up until the ‘historic’ deal on the Multiannual Financial Framework and Recovery Fund of 21 July. Where most media accounts and scholarly assessments focus on the high‐level deal making between political leaders, we trace the proceedings inside the EU's institutional machinery, which produced the solutions and laid out the groundwork for a deal. The reconstruction assesses the role and influence of the EU institutions – the European Commission in particular – in producing this major step. We show that the process was characterized by a handicapped European Council, which hampered the ability of member states to oversee and control developments. The conclusions discuss the implications of our findings for our understanding of (institutional) leadership and policy making during crisis.

This article contributes to our understanding of the formation of policy networks. Research suggests that organisations collaborate with those that are perceived to be influential in order to access scarce political resources. Other studies show that organisations prefer to interact with those that share core policy beliefs on the basis of trust. This article seeks to develop new analytical tools for testing these alternative hypotheses. First, it measures whether perceptions of reputational leadership affect the likelihood of an organisation being the target or instigator of collaboration with others. Second, it tests whether the degree of preference similarity between two organisations makes them more or less likely to collaborate. The article adopts a mixed‐methods approach, combining exponential random graph models (ERGM) with qualitative interviews, to analyse and explain organisational collaboration around United Kingdom banking reform. It is found that reputational leadership and preference similarity exert a strong, positive and complementary effect on network formation. In particular, leadership is significant whether this is measured as an organisational attribute or as an individually held perception. Evidence is also found of closed or clique‐like network structures, and heterophily effects based on organisational type. These results offer significant new insights into the formation of policy networks in the banking sector and the drivers of collaboration between financial organisations.

When individuals are confronted with information about why and where gender quotas should apply, does it affect their attitudes? A growing literature argues that information affects opinions on gender equality, but so far there is more consensus on who supports such policies than on what type of information convinces those on the fence. Using a survey experiment fielded among Norwegian citizens and elected representatives, we examine the potential of new rationales and different areas of application to find out what makes (some) people more supportive of gender quotas. Overall, we find that citizens are more affected by moral arguments than elected representatives. Among citizens, we find that emphasizing women's distinct insights boosts support among those with less fixed opinions, and that a talent framing hinting at women as an untapped resource might cause the opposite reaction. Representatives are affected by information about where gender quotas apply, as they are particularly sensitive to information on gender quotas in politics. Quite unexpectedly, we find that those on the right are more supportive of gender quotas in the leadership of religious institutions than elsewhere, and that this seems to be driven at least partly by scepticism against migrants.

Civil society leadership training programmes are a new phenomenon, and they are often overlooked by civil society scholarship despite being linked to the professionalisation of the sector. In this article, we examine 14 Swedish leadership programmes in order to identify leadership ideals in the sector. Drawing on the notion of ‘symbolic boundaries’, we argue that leadership programmes produce horizontal boundaries in relation to other societal sectors and vertical boundaries between leaders of the sector and other members. Together, these symbolic boundaries form a leadership ideal that detaches leaders from their organisation and internal democratic processes, instead depicting leadership as a question of personal characteristics and values. Leaders in the sector need to be authentic and to anchor their leadership in the personal values they hold. Theoretically, our analytical model may prove useful in the study of other empirical phenomena in civil society.

There is little doubt that the European Central Bank (ECB), and in particular its presidency, has taken the lead in tackling the euro crisis. But can this leadership be also characterised as charismatic? This article answers the question by focusing on language – a key component as well as a reliable indicator of charisma. By means of a software‐assisted content analysis of the entire corpus of ECB presidential speeches, it is found that the crisis has indeed led to the emergence of the Bank's presidency as a charismatic euro leader. This in turn confirms the recent politicisation of the ECB, but at the same time might be seen as mitigating the problems related to the Bank's democratic deficit, to the extent that charisma can be seen, from a Weberian standpoint, as an alternative source of political legitimacy.

Governments led by technocrats remain a nebulous category in political science literature, with little clarity about how they differ from party governments, how many have existed and how we can differentiate between them. This article aims to provide that conceptual and empirical clarity. Having proposed an ideal type definition of ‘technocratic government’, it sets out three conditions for an operational definition of a ‘technocrat’ and, on that basis, lists the 24 technocrat‐led governments that have existed in 27 European Union (EU) democracies from the end of the Second World War until June 2013. It then classifies these according to their partisan/technocrat composition and remit. This allows for the presentation of a typology of four different types of technocrat‐led governments and the definition of ‘full technocratic governments’ as those which contain a majority of technocrats and – unlike caretaker governments – have the capacity to change the status quo. The article concludes that full technocratic governments remain extremely rare in EU democracies since there have been only six cases – of which three have occurred in the last decade.

This paper reports on a case study of collective coproduction in an Australian community-based disaster risk management (CBDRM) project called “Be Ready Warrandyte”. The first goal of the case study was to understand what interactions and power-sharing between citizens and government “looked and felt like” in a significant example of community-led CBDRM in an Australian context. Its second, broader goal was to test the extent to which foundational coproduction theory, specifically four conditions proposed by Elinor Ostrom for enabling coproduction that is more effective than either government or citizen production alone, can explain the citizen-government interactions, roles and contributions that enable successful community-led CBDRM. The study confirms that each of the four conditions—complementarity, authority, incentives and credible commitment—also apply to community-led as well as government-led initiatives. It reinforces the central importance of complementarity for avoiding offloading of risk, responsibility and cost to citizens from government, while also suggesting that specific sources of internal and external authority, incentives, and credible commitment are especially important when coproduction is community-led. It identifies leadership and its impacts on government-citizen relationships and power-sharing in coproduction as an important area that needs further research.

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.