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The dynamic relations that develop between institutional actors within the formal European Union (EU) institutional structure and the ways in which they shape what the EU does are the subject of this chapter. It provides a succinct overview of how EU policy‐making is shaped through the interaction of different institutions and through political inputs from parties, citizens, and interest groups. The bulk of important policy‐making comes in the form of an ordinary legislative procedure, a consensual process of institutionalized negotiation that links together the Commission, the Council, and the European Parliament. The chapter explains interest groups vary in their resources and ability to mobilize citizens, which results in their having different approaches as to how to influence EU policy‐making. Member states share the setting of the EU policy agenda and decision‐making responsibilities with supranational institutions, notably the Commission and the Parliament.

This study examines whether the mandatory adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) in the European Union significantly improves information comparability in 17 European countries. We employ three proxies—the similarity of accounting functions that translate economic events into accounting data, the degree of information transfer, and the similarity of the information content of earnings and of the book value of equity—to measure information comparability. Our results suggest that mandatory IFRS adoption improves cross-country information comparability by making similar things look more alike without making different things look less different. Our results also suggest that both accounting convergence and higher quality information under IFRS are the likely drivers of the comparability improvement. In addition, we find some evidence that cross-country comparability improvement is affected by firms' institutional environment.

This study supports the idea that fields form around issues, and describes the roles of various stakeholders in the structuring, shaping, and legitimating of the emerging field of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). A model of the institutional history of the CSR field is outlined, of which a key stage is the appearance of CSR rating agencies as the significant players and Institutional Entrepreneurs of the field. We show to which extent the creation and further development of CSR rating agencies, and the activism of other significant stakeholders of the field (typically portrayed as \"standard setters\" and \"regulatory agents\"), contribute to the institutionalization of CSR. With this in mind, among various stakeholders that legitimate the field of CSR, we present the efforts of global and local stakeholders such as the European Union, the United Nations, the International Organization for Standardization, and governments and their interactions. We suggest that the different paths of CSR development and institutionalization in France and in the United States depend on the nature of local and global stakeholders' involvement in this process and their interactions.

This paper explores whether social ties, proxied by Facebook friendship links, can explain why the number and value of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) are greater within countries than between countries. We find that social ties are positively correlated with the number and value of M&As. We also demonstrate that the home bias in M&As is greatly reduced once we control for the differences in social ties between and within countries. We further find that social ties particularly facilitate M&As when the level of corruption is high, press freedom is limited in the target country, and there are more cultural differences between the acquirer and target countries.

The questions asked in the paper are whether and to what extent the employment situation among recent third-country immigrants differs across European Union countries and how it is related to these countries' labor market characteristics. The European Labor Force Survey data for the 1990s are used to disentangle the roles that the individual characteristics of immigrants, on the one hand, and the structural features of the receiving societies, on the other, play in the process of immigrants' labor market integration. The results of multilevel regression analyses confirm that in receiving countries with stronger demand for low-skilled labor, unprivileged immigrants are less disadvantaged at employment entry. Among men immigrants' employment disadvantages are found to be lower in liberal welfare states marked by their flexible labor markets.

We provide a comparative overview of the process of implementation, harmonization and stabilization of public oversight systems for statutory auditors across the European Union (EU) after Directive 2006/43/EC. We build on institutional change theory to identify potential determinants as to why some countries still lag in this harmonization process. Oversight systems are a key institutional factor to guarantee the quality of financial information, essential to maintain investors’ confidence and deep and stable capital markets. Thus, the harmonization of these systems has long been an objective of the EU. Our analyses serve to identify, analyse and compare how EU countries have incorporated European-wide requirements into their national legal systems. Particularly, we study: (1) basic characteristics of the system and bodies for public oversight, (2) organizational structure, (3) financing (4) transparency, (5) supervisory, and (6) disciplinary mechanisms. We show that significant diversity still exists across systems and that both the incentives for institutional change and the distance between pre-existing systems and the Directive are important explanatory factors of the achieved level of harmonization.

The Emancipation of Europe's Muslims traces how governments across Western Europe have responded to the growing presence of Muslim immigrants in their countries over the past fifty years. Drawing on hundreds of in-depth interviews with government officials and religious leaders in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Morocco, and Turkey, Jonathan Laurence challenges the widespread notion that Europe's Muslim minorities represent a threat to liberal democracy.

Post-Brexit is currently being researched as not only an important geopolitical change but also as an economically conflicted period that constantly generates many issues in finance, accounting, and taxation. This paper aims to consider, identify and forecast – whether and what – the new directions for the development of IFRS and GAAP UK after Brexit. The research methods are based on a deductive research approach with elements of descriptive content analysis. The results of the study helped to determine the development direction of accounting in the UK after Brexit in the short term – the continued application of IFRS, adopted by the EU. However, it is obtained that the task of the British government – to harmonize its sovereignty with IFRS, taking into account the requirements of the EU – is being successfully implemented. So, the direction of the development of British accounting in the future – is the creation of its mechanism for the approval of national standards, controlled by the government. However, the British accounting system and IFRSs have many unresolved issues after Brexit that might be the subject of future studies.

In 2006, the European Union launched its new free trade strategy Global Europe with the explicit goal of increasing European competitiveness. This article explores the positions of trade unions and other social movements on Global Europe. Importantly, while Northern social movements and trade unions from the Global South reject Global Europe due to its impact of deindustrialisation on developing countries, European trade unions support it in so far as it opens up new markets for the export of European manufactured goods. It will be argued that this has to be understood against the background of the dynamics underlying the global economy and here in particular uneven and combined development. Due to the uneven integration of different parts of the world into the global economy, workers in developed countries may actually benefit from free trade, while workers in the Global South are more likely to lose out. It will, however, also be argued that while these different positions within the social relations of production are shaping the position of trade unions, they do not determine them. Over time, through direct engagement, trade unions in the North and South may be able to establish relations of transnational solidarity.

The analytical research question of this contribution is twofold. (1) To develop (and to proto-type) a conceptual framework of analysis for a global comparison of quality of democracy. This framework also references to the concept of the “Quadruple Helix innovation systems” (Carayannis and Campbell). (2) The same conceptual framework is being used and tested for comparing and measuring empirical quality of democracy in the different OECD and European Union (EU27) member countries. In theoretical and conceptual terms, we refer to a Quadruple-Dimensional structure, also a Quadruple Helix structure (a “Model of Quadruple Helix Structures”) of the four basic (conceptual) dimensions of freedom, equality, control, and sustainable development for explaining and comparing democracy and quality of democracy. Put in summary, we may conclude for the USA that the comparative strength of quality of democracy in the USA focuses on the dimension of freedom. The comparative weakness of the quality of democracy in the USA lies in the dimension of equality, most importantly income equality. Quadruple Helix refers here to at least two crucial perspectives: (1) the unfolding of an innovative knowledge economy also requires (at least in a longer perspective) the unfolding of a knowledge democracy; (2) knowledge and innovation are being defined as key for sustainable development and for the further evolution of quality of democracy. How to innovate (and reinvent) knowledge democracy? There is a potential that democracy discourses and innovation discourses advance in a next-step and two-way mutual cross-reference. The architectures of Quadruple Helix (and Quintuple Helix) innovation systems demand and require the formation of a democracy, implicating that quality of democracy provides for a support and encouragement of innovation and innovation systems, so that quality of democracy and progress of innovation mutually “Cross-Helix” in a connecting and amplifying mode and manner. This relates research on quality of democracy to research on innovation (innovation systems) and the knowledge economy. “Cyber democracy” receives here a new and important meaning.