We present a unified analysis for a family of variational time discretization methods, including discontinuous Galerkin methods and continuous Galerkin–Petrov methods, applied to non-stiff initial value problems. Besides the well-definedness of the methods, the global error and superconvergence properties are analyzed under rather weak abstract assumptions which also allow considerations of a wide variety of quadrature formulas. Numerical experiments illustrate and support the theoretical results.