Margrethe Vestager and European Competition:

Gender and Political Leadership in Global Economic Governance

My second book project focuses on Margrethe Vestager, currently the Commission’s Executive Vice President and Commissioner for Competition (2014-2024), who has won landmark international antitrust cases, including against Amazon, Google, and Apple during her tenure.

Although she has been one of the longest-serving female commissioners and one of the most successful commissioners in Europe’s recent history, scholarship has been conspicuously missing, whether on Vestager’s leadership or her competition portfolio from a gender perspective. While competition is a highly prestigious portfolio with far-reaching investigative and decision-making powers, competition enforcement (including cartelization, antitrust, merger regulation, and state aid control) has been highly male-dominated and rendered in masculine—capitalist-competitive—terms.

Drawing on feminist economics, feminist institutionalism, and gender and leadership research, this project will analyze Vestager’s positioning as a leader and as a woman leader in global competition policy. The analysis will focus on her agenda-setting, in/formal mediation, and public-facing leadership, comparing these to other antitrust leaders, as well as examining how European and international audiences evaluated her leadership from a gender perspective.