Collective Action In The European Union

Collective Action in the European Union addresses fundamental questions surrounding the European political economy. The impressive array of contributors ask how and why collective action is formed at the European level. They also consider whether collective action at the transnational level is driven by rational, utility maximising behaviour, or whether explanations couched in social terms are more convincing. Many of the chapters introduce fresh empirical studies, in the domains of business, the professions, consumers and environmental interests.

Interpreting Convergence in the European Union introduces the idea of collective action as a prerequisite for achieving convergence and cohesion in the European Union. Institutional networks and social capital play a crucial role in influencing actors' preferences and shaping institutional interactions through the process of political exchange and socialization. Although the main focus of the book is on policymaking processes and governance structures in EU regional policy, its core theoretical hypotheses and conclusion are drawn from empirical research into the response of Greek regions to the challenges of Europeanization. This framework is applicable to almost all areas of EU public policymaking.

La perspective proposée consiste à rapprocher l'analyse des comportements protestataires et des mouvements sociaux de celles des groupes d'intérêts et de leur influence sur les politiques publiques.

This open access book offers an analytical presentation of how Europe has created its own version of collective actions. In the last three decades, Europe has seen a remarkable proliferation of collective action legislation, making class actions the most successful export product of the American legal scholarship. While its spread has been surrounded by distrust and suspiciousness, today more than half of the EU Member States have introduced collective actions for damages and from those who did, more than half chose, to some extent, the opt-out system.This book demonstrates why collective actions have been felt needed from the perspective of access to justice and effectiveness of law, the European debate and the deep layers of the European reaction and resistance, revealing how the Copernican turn of class actions questions the fundamentals of the European thinking about market and public interest. Using a transsystemic presentation of the European national models, it analyzes the way collective actions were accommodated with the European regulatory environment, the novel and peculiar regulatory questions they had to address and how and why they work differently on this side of the Atlantic.

Interpreting Convergence in the European Union introduces the idea of collective action as a prerequisite for achieving convergence and cohesion in the European Union. Institutional networks and social capital play a crucial role in influencing actors' preferences and shaping institutional interactions through the process of political exchange and socialization. Although the main focus of the book is on policymaking processes and governance structures in EU regional policy, its core theoretical hypotheses and conclusion are drawn from empirical research into the response of Greek regions to the challenges of Europeanization. This framework is applicable to almost all areas of EU public policymaking.

This book offers a state-of-the-art discussion of the political issues surrounding unemployment in Europe. Its unique combination offers both a policy and institutional perspective, whilst studying the viewpoint of individual civil society members engaging in collective action on the issue of joblessness. It is the result of Marco Giugni’s three year cross-national comparative research project, financed by the European Commission, united with hand picked contributions from invited experts. Throughout his study he focuses on how the EU approaches national unemployment, the main national differences in talk about unemployment and unemployment policy, and how the representatives of the unemployed produce and coordinate demands in relation to unemployment policy. This book contains a number of genuinely cross-national chapters along with sections on specific national cases, namely the UK, Ireland, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and Sweden.

Academic Paper from the year 2013 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Topic: European Union, Aalborg University, language: English, abstract: This project aims to explore the mechanisms behind the solving of collective problems in integrated regions. One of the most successful cases of regional integration is the EU. For the past 60 years the process of integration has been developing in the EU towards a deeper integration of its members. The goal of this process is that - by acting as a unit - the EU can deal more effectively with the problems that require a regional approach. However, this is a slow process and it is still far from being fully accomplished. The integration process requires the willingness of the members to adjust their national law to the regional interest which in some areas has been hard to achieve. One of those areas is the EU Migration and Asylum policy that affects all the EU members and has been one of the most difficult matters to achieve an effective cooperation. Therefore this project explores these weaknesses by highlighting the lack of solidarity between the EU members and the uneven burden-sharing that contributes to an ineffective EU policy on this issue.

Comparative labour law emerging from this book [...] launches new ideas and sends new messages, well beyond close self-referential circles, out into the borderless community of scholars, social partners and economic actors, interested in pursuing social justice.-Silvana Sciarra --Book Jacket.