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This article analyzes the formation of lobbying coalitions in European Union legislative politics. Specifically, we investigate whether interest organizations establish coalitions and under which conditions business interests and non-business interests join a coalition. Our explanatory framework emphasizes three factors that drive coalition formation: the influence-seeking needs of interest groups, the need to ensure organizational maintenance, and policy-related contextual factors. To test our hypotheses, we analyze 72 policies initiated by the European Commission between 2008 and 2010 and 143 semi-structured interviews with representatives of European interest organizations. Our results demonstrate that non-governmental organizations that depend relatively less on membership support are strongly inclined to engage in coalitions. Moreover, the heterogeneous coalitions we identified—consisting of both business and non-business interests—are usually situated in policy areas that enjoy considerable salience among the broader public and emerge on issues that receive substantial media visibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we explore Norwegian Progress Party politicians’ change of their rhetoric of immigration after the party for the first time became part of a coalition government in 2013. Equal to other right-wing populist parties in Europe, immigration has been the main reason for voters to support the Progress Party. How then does their immigration rhetoric change after entering office? This is important, as an intolerant immigration rhetoric has far-reaching consequences for the political climate in Europe. Right-wing populist parties can achieve much regarding migration policies merely because there is broad consensus on a strict migration policy today. However, to succeed remaining in office, they must remain being acceptable to other parties in the parliament and their coalition partner and therefore they need to moderate the way they go about communicating their message. Too much moderation however might lead to a split within the party, or losing core voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of ownership is well known in relation to global governance. In the realm of EU macro‐economic coordination, it has become a buzzword since the revamping process of the European Semester in 2015. This article investigates how ownership by four types of domestic actors (governments, administrations, parliaments and social partners) manifests itself in the European Semester. We conceptualize three types of ownership, namely institutional, political, and cognitive. Using network analysis, semi‐structured interviews, and a small‐scale survey, we find that ownership is strongest among governments and administrations which are able to shape the outputs of the European Semester (institutional ownership) with little political disagreement (political ownership). While national parliaments display low levels of all types of ownership, employers and unions exhibit relatively strong cognitive ownership. We conclude that the European Semester remains a bureaucratic process contributing to building a multi‐level administrative space rather than an arena for political debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the formal powers of the European Parliament have increased with successive treaty changes, its committees' administrations have seen a parallel growth. We argue that such administrative capacity is necessary but not sufficient for acting on formal treaty powers. Administrative capacity has to be combined with political capacity in order to muster policy impact in European Union decision‐making. By differentiating between intra‐institutional administrative and inter‐institutional political capacity, we offer a fine‐grained conceptualization of policy capacity while broadening the theoretical and empirical understanding of the European Parliament's administration as an organizational structure of formal and informal working practices, intra‐institutional coordination and inter‐institutional relations. Based on expert interviews, document analysis and participant observation, the case of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership illustrates how societal politicization of a specific policy issue triggered the European Parliament to exploit the latent potential of its post‐Lisbon administrative capacity by transforming it into a more readily deployable political capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

States often violate international agreements, both accidentally and intentionally. To process complaints efficiently, states can create formal, pretrial procedures in which governments can negotiate with litigants before a case ever goes to court. If disputes are resolved during pretrial negotiations, it can be very difficult to tell what has happened. Are governments coming into compliance? If so, are they only doing so when they have accidentally committed a violation or even when they are intentionally resisting? Or are challenges simply being dropped? This paper presents a formal model to address these questions. We develop our theory in the context of the European Union (EU). To test our model, we collect a new dataset of over 13,000 Commission infringement cases against EU member states (2003–2013). Our results suggest that accidental and intentional noncompliance both occur, but that intentional noncompliance is more common in the EU. We find that the Commission is an effective, if imperfect, monitor and enforcer of international law. The Commission can correct intentional noncompliance, but not always. It strategically drops cases that it believes it is unlikely to win. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Radical right wing parties have been increasingly effective in challenging and eroding this consensus, using a redemptive sovereigntist platform to 'take back control' from the EU in a number of important policy areas. Their electoral gains, but more importantly their growing agenda-setting momentum, have combined with an alarming hardening of attitudes in large sectors of the political and social mainstream in the same sovereigntist direction. Unless the EU shifts the discussion effectively and convincingly, addressing the causes of citizen resentment without adopting the language and logic of the right wing populists, its future as a united, politically relevant block looks uncertain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In late-March 2019 the United Kingdom is scheduled to leave the European Union. Will Brexit lead to Germany becoming the EU's hegemon? The commentary explores the likely impact of Brexit on policy areas and intergovernmental politics in the EU. It focuses on the sources of German hegemony: structural, ideational and diplomatic power as well as the need for Germany's role to be legitimate amongst partner states and to have domestic support. Two scenarios are suggested: the Franco-German partnership's revival or a form of German hegemony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some European Union member states’ financial regulators choose to make some of the data they routinely collect on individual banks publicly available. Others treat this data as confidential. What explains this difference? This paper considers the possible effects of crises, path-dependent legal institutions, and the design of deposit insurance schemes. At the national level, the paper focuses on contrasting German and Dutch cases. After the recent economic crisis, the Dutch released more data while the German authorities maintained strict confidentiality rules. The design of deposit insurance schemes provides a key reason why the level of secrecy varies, with the Dutch move from an ex post to an ex ante scheme where the government served as the ultimate backstop leading to questions about the accounts of individual banks while the German system favoured continued secrecy. The paper also describes the level of transparency at the EU level. Multilevel legal restrictions and bureaucratic capacity tilt EU banking union practices towards member states that treat financial supervisory data as confidential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contribution addresses - through actor-centred historical institutionalism - why and how social investment (SI) emerged at the European Union (EU) level. SI policies built on the institutional basis of the policy co-ordination processes in employment and social inclusion, which originated in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The pre-existent processes represented the necessary but not sufficient condition for the EU SIP to materialise. The decisive factor was the activity of three types of entrepreneurs - intellectual, bureaucratic and political - that enabled the crystallization of the EU Social Investment package (SIP) through issue-framing, institutional alignment and consensus-building. Despite this, the SIP of 2013 ended as a ‘social investment moment’ that rapidly lost momentum because no additional measures such as indicators or funds were integrated with SIP. Furthermore, the Commission’s political priorities changed and the key entrepreneurs that had been active for the materialisation of the SIP were no longer centre stage. The continued presence of former influential entrepreneurs in the EU policy arena, although in different roles, may enable integration of EU SI into new EU social policy initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses gender issues in European Union studies. It states the key gaps like the lack of feminist engagement in mainstream approaches to the study of the EU, and mentions that feminist approaches can engage in a dialogue with EU studies about the very nature of the discipline. It notes that so-called malestream approaches not only legitimize gender blindness and masculine influences but also help to construct a Union that sidelines the interests.

This paper studies how voting rules affect the ease with which decisions are made, basing the analysis on the key premise that ideology makes some coalitions more likely to form than others. Our study focuses on the Council of the European Union (EU), where member states hold different voting weights and ideological positions are strongly linked to the affiliation of actors to political parties. Accordingly, to explore the influence of ideology on the probability of coalition formation, and to thus formulate a ‘decision probability’, we incorporate ideological positions in the analysis of efficiency of the voting system. For the case of the EU, we particularly consider the transition from the triple-majority voting system of the Nice Treaty to the double-majority system incorporated into the Lisbon Treaty. The standard assumption that member states vote independently and affirmatively with a probability of 0.5 leads to a more pessimistic view of the Council’s decision-making capacity than does the premise that member state votes are biased towards voting with the Council majority. The latter assumption is supported by voting data and anecdotal evidence on the ‘consensus-seeking’ culture in the Council. Hence, this paper offers some insights into the ‘efficiency’ of the decision-making process, given institutional voting rules, in combination with actual actor ideological positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various articles in the issue on topics including continuation of crises in ASEAN and European Union countries due to a lack of leadership; financial crisis and continuity; and political crises in the perspective of international relation.

The causes and consequences of the Euro crisis have led comparative political economy scholars to question whether European integration can accommodate diverse models of capitalism. This special issue addresses two important questions about the compatibility of diverse growth models within the European Union (EU): Are some growth regimes better suited to European integration than others? and does the EU favour a particular constellation of domestic institutions? Contributions within this special issue provide a qualified yes to these questions, concluding that the EU favours export-led growth models whilst it penalises and discourages domestic consumption-oriented growth paths, particularly those that are financed by debt accumulation. While recent comparative capitalism literature highlights that Europeanmonetary integrationhas favoured export-led growth regimes, contributions in this special issue outline that the EU’s prioritisation of export-led growth over domestic demand-led growth is present in other facets of integration, including EU accession, financial integration, the free movement of people, fiscal governance and the Europe 2020 growth strategy. Findings here provide important insights for both the European integration and comparative capitalism literature, highlighting that the unique economic ties being forged within the European project may be problematic for those countries outside northwestern Europe and for workers in low-wage domestic sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The primary goal of this article is to analyse the use of the term 'tax avoidance' in the legislative framework and case law of the European Union to point out the absence of a common linguistic approach. The consequences derived from the terminological chaos will also be discussed; thus, the study will try to display how big and deep the problem is by giving special attention to the semantic aspects that cannot, in fact, be ignored anymore. Furthermore, the principles stemming from the case law will be reviewed, since they are regarded as the outcome of the interpretation of tax avoidance by the judiciary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The role of national parliaments in EU matters has become an important subject in the debate over the democratic legitimacy of the European Union. Yet despite a remarkable increase in parliamentary involvement in EU affairs, the added value in terms of democratic legitimacy will remain limited if citizens are not aware of their activities. Given that citizens mainly experience politics through the media, the aim of the paper is therefore to explore whether and under what conditions parliamentary involvement in EU matters is visible in national newspapers. The paper draws on two quantitative datasets covering parliamentary EU activities and relevant newspaper articles in seven Member States between 2010 and 2013. Results suggest that the efforts of active parliaments pay off. In addition, conflict within government coalitions over EU issues and greater salience of EU politics in public opinion increase coverage while, surprisingly, both public and parliamentary euroscepticism do not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The rise of regional governments in Europe has been often espoused on democratic grounds. Yet the democratic promise of political decentralization should be evaluated in light of its potential undermining effects upon the essential mechanism to make accountability work: citizens’ capacity to assign responsibility for policy outcomes. People may get it wrong when assigning responsibility because they are not sure who is responsible for policy outcomes when powers are vertically fragmented between different levels of government and/or simply because their responsibility judgements are biased by political beliefs, which act as lenses through which attribution is filtered. How can we then make electoral accountability work in decentralized systems? This paper will explore this question by delving into the most important theoretical and empirical challenges in the study of attribution of responsibility and electoral accountability in decentralized contexts. At the theoretical level, there is still need of a better understanding of the relationship between federal institutional conditions and individuals’ use of cognitive bias to cope with institutional complexity when assigning responsibility. The empirical challenge is to overcome the lack of comparable individual‐level data on responsibility attribution for a broad range of country cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The European Union has developed into a multilevel electoral system in which elections take place at regional, national and European tiers of governance. Election scholars have taken up an interest in European and regional elections and the dominant approach to study these elections is the second‐order election model. This model has generated important insights but it also faces limitations. A multilevel party system perspective exposes several vertical and horizontal interactions between electoral arenas. An empirical analysis on second‐order effects in European elections held in 217 regions and 11 countries reveals that regional authority, regional identity and electoral timing of regional vis‐à‐vis European elections significantly alters the extent and way in which national politics flows into the European electoral arena. These results provide strong evidence that regionalization has significantly transformed European elections but this impact only comes to the fore once one adopts a multilevel party system perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Does corruption influence trust in national institutions in the same way as trust in international institutions? Did this influence change over the economic crisis 2008? Using data from the European Social Survey, we examined the association between corruption and trust in national and European parliaments before and after the start of the Great Recession 2008. We found that over the Crisis, the effect of corruption on trust in national parliament became more negative than it was before 2008. We also discovered a positive association between corruption and trust in the EU before the Crisis. That is, states with a higher level of national corruption seem to have more trust in international institutions, such as the EU. However, this relationship disappears after 2008. Our findings contribute to the debates on the impact of corruption on trust in national and international institutions, and on the consequences of the Great Recession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impact of external actors on political change in the European neighbourhood has mostly been examined through the prism of elite empowerment through externally offered incentives. The legitimacy of external policies has received less scrutiny, both with regard to liberal powers promoting democracy and illiberal powers preventing democracy. This article investigates the conflicting notions of legitimate political governance that underpin the contest between the European Union (EU) and Russia in the Eastern neighbourhood. It proposes four mechanisms of external soft influence that take into account the EU's and Russia's actorness and the structural power of their norms of political governance, and consider their effects on domestic actors and societal understandings of appropriate forms of political authority. It finally traces the EU's and Russia's soft influence on political governance in Ukraine. It maintains that through shaping the domestic understandings of legitimate political authority and reinforcing the domestic political competition, the EU and Russia have both left a durable imprint on Ukraine's uneven political path. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution contends that the European Union (EU) has taken an authoritarian turn in the past crisis decade, which needs to be systematically addressed in EU studies. Starting from an ideal-typical conception of scenarios for the EU’s emergent political order, it argues that there has been a shift towards decisionist authority structures at both the domestic and the European level. On the one hand, the distinct European emergency politics that characterized the euro crisis have introduced traits of authoritarian rule in the EU’s supranational governance. On the other hand, democratic backsliding and the rise of nationalist populism have prompted authoritarian and anti-European tendencies at the national level. The article claims that the developments are linked and mutually reinforcing – building a ‘cycle of authoritarianism’. Given its dire consequences, EU studies need to reorient towards understanding the dynamic interplay of integration types and domestic politics and rethink questions of democratic legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An analysis of ‘fractured polity’ and ‘fractious politics’ highlights the impact of multiple crises on the European Union whose distinctive characteristics have been severely tested and contested in recent years. I explore three dimensions of Europe’s fractured polity, beginning with the manner in which the Union has addressed or failed to address the crises it faces. I go on to reveal the impact of these crises on European politics, and finally point to issues that demand attention from social scientists. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the challenges of double sovereignty in European Union. Topics discussed icnlude advantages of European integration and its impact on the future development; interpretation of European constitutional doctrine; and views of German sociologist, Jürgen Habermas on supranational constituent power.

More than 10 years after the introduction of immigrant integration policies in Western Europe, policy debates have shifted from conceptual issues (What is integration? When is an immigrant integrated into a society?) to the effectiveness of integration policies (Do integration policies help immigrants to find jobs, learn a language or access services?). There is, in other words, a manifest need of an evidence basis, but no scientific studies on the topic have been published so far. Is there an evidence basis for immigrant integration policies? Which standards ought such an evidence basis to fulfil? This article addresses the two questions from an exploratory perspective. It provides an overview of the available information on the effectiveness of immigrant integration policies across the European Union and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. By doing so, it contributes to the incorporation of the perspective of evidence-based policy literature from the field of public administration into immigrant integration studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose “Wide area cooperation” may be the ultimate challenge within transnational cooperation processes. Although the Alps share a remarkable history of mutual collaboration, they are facing the challenge of a new sustainable-coordination paradigm. The Alpine territories are at a turning point. They are striving for a new governance arrangement and trying to avoid both the Scylla of top-town dirigisme and the Charybdis of poor local governments. This paper aims to address the recent literature on the EU Strategy for the Alpine Region (EUSALP) macro-regional strategy; provide some insights into the role that EUSALP could play as ultimate coordinator of the numerous networks operating in the Alpine space; and discuss a workable division of labour among the different actors that can ensure a renewed focus on sustainable development.Design/methodology/approach The review addresses two main strands of literature related to “wide area cooperation” and “multi-level governance” to synthesise the debate on the most appropriate governance structure for the Alps. The paper examines, dating back to 2000, the recent history of bottom-up projects related to sustainable tourism in the western arc of the Alps. The study uses a subset of best practices to evaluate the emerging governance frame.Findings The main outcomes of this study are a framework for a theoretical debate on the most appropriate governance structure for the Alps, guidance for policymakers on a division of labour among different stakeholders that can promote sustainable tourism in the Alps and a set of suggestions for practitioners. Further, the study acknowledges “sustainable tourism” as a highly relevant field to the emergence of bottom-up arrangements aimed at developing workable governance agreements.Research limitations/implications The paper provides a state-of-the-art framework for “wide area cooperation” in the Alps and serves as a basis for discussion between academics and practitioners. As EUSALP is still in its infancy, its success will depend on the pro-active involvement of national stakeholders. In the case of Italy, this is all but granted because of the current unstable political situation.Originality/value This paper provides a rigorous framework for addressing top-down strategies and bottom-up planning in the Alpine space. The study also makes a practical contribution by addressing some topics of interest to policymakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European Union (EU) referendums provide unique opportunities to study voters' attitudes toward a distant level of governance. Scholars have long tried to understand whether EU referendum results reflect domestic (dis-)satisfaction with the incumbent governments or actual attitudes toward the Union. Finding evidence supporting both domestic and European factors, the recent focus has thus turned to referendum campaigns. Recent studies emphasise the importance of the information provided to voters during these campaigns in order to analyse how domestic or European issues become salient in the minds of voters. These studies nonetheless overlook the asymmetrical political advantage in such campaigns. The broader literature on referendums and public opinion suggest that in a referendum, the 'No' side typically has the advantage since it can boost the public's fears by linking the proposal to unpopular issues. This article explores whether this dynamic applies to EU treaty ratification referendums. Does the anti-EU treaty campaign have more advantage than the pro-EU treaty campaign in these referendums? Campaign strategies in 11 EU treaty ratification referendums are analysed, providing a clear juxtaposition between pro-treaty ('Yes') and anti-treaty ('No') campaigns. Based on 140 interviews with campaigners in 11 referendums, a series of indicators on political setting and campaign characteristics, as well as an in-depth case study of the 2012 Irish Fiscal Compact referendum, it is found that the anti-treaty side indeed holds the advantage if it engages the debate. Nonetheless, the findings also show that this advantage is not unconditional. The underlying mechanism rests on the multidimensionality of the issue. The extent to which the referendum debate includes a large variety of 'No' campaign arguments correlates strongly with the campaigners' perceived advantage/disadvantage, and the referendum results. When the 'No' side's arguments are limited (either through a single-issue treaty or guarantees from the EU), this provides the 'Yes' side with a 'cleaner' agenda with which to work. Importantly, the detailed data demonstrate that the availability of arguments is important for the 'Yes' side as well. They tend to have the most advantage when they can tap into the economic costs of an anti-EU vote. This analysis has implications for other kinds of EU referendums such as Brexit, non-EU referendums such as independence referendums, and the future of European integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does the European Union integrate new values into the text of its treaties? A growing body of literature indicates that, in the past three decades, new norms and values have entered the EU's discourse, resulting in what is usually termed 'normative power Europe'. Yet the research and knowledge to-date about the EU's discursive assimilation of new values and norms is surprisingly poor. As any institutional change, such integration has the potential to undermine the coherence of the EU's identity and thus also its objective to 'speak with one voice'. This article explores the EU's discursive management of the continuity-versus-change imperative by analysing the integration of new values into the text of its treaties. This issue is addressed based on a quantitative content analysis on the full texts of European founding treaties between the 1950s and 2009. Findings show that the distribution of the EU's values in the text is not uniform: while the language of market economy and democracy is pervasive, the values of peace, European identity, rights and social justice are mentioned less frequently and in restricted linguistic environments. To account for the differences in the integration of values into the EU's treaty discourse, the article develops the notion of a discursive mechanism of differentiated value integration (MDVI). This rationale echoes the logic of differentiation in policy implementation employed by the EU. It is claimed here that, applied in the European discursive arena, MDVI allows radically different readings of the same text. This helps the EU to maintain a coherent value identity while at the same time enabling change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While anti-immigrant parties have been electorally successful in European parliaments, it is still unclear whether they have influenced policies. This article contributes by investigating the anti-immigrant party policy impact on a previously unexplored welfare policy area, that concerning the mobility of vulnerable European Union/European Economic Area citizens. In Sweden, the aid offered to these citizens varies a great deal in different municipalities. Furthermore, the largest anti-immigrant party (Sweden Democrats) has, unlike the mainstream political parties, preferences for a strict policy in line with so-called welfare chauvinism. Taking advantage of this subnational variation, our data give us a unique opportunity to investigate whether anti-immigrant party representation impacts welfare policy outcomes. The empirical findings show a negative correlation between Sweden Democrats' representation and the aid offered and indicates that municipalities where Sweden Democrats holds a pivotal position offer less aid to vulnerable European Union/European Economic Area citizens. The hypothesis that these effects are conditional upon the ideology of the ruling coalition is, however, not supported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars of mobilisation and policy influence employ two quite different approaches to mapping interest group systems. Those interested in research questions on mobilisation typically rely on a bottom-up mapping strategy in order to characterise the total size and composition of interest group communities. Researchers with an interest in policy influence usually rely on a top-down strategy in which the mapping of politically active organisations depends on samples of specific policies. But some scholars also use top-down data gathered for other research questions on mobilisation (and vice versa). However, it is currently unclear how valid such large-N data for different types of research questions are. We illustrate our argument by addressing these questions using unique data sets drawn from the INTEREURO project on lobbying in the European Union and the European Union's Transparency Register. Our findings suggest that top-down and bottom-up mapping strategies lead to profoundly different maps of interest group communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the politics of copyright and copying. Copyright is an increasingly important driver of the modern economy, but this does not exhaust its significance. It matters, we argue, not just for the distribution of rewards and resources in the creative industries, but as a site within which established political concerns - collective and individual interests and identities - are articulated and negotiated and within which notions of 'originality', 'creativity' and 'copying' are politically constituted. Set against the background of the increasing economic value attributed to the creative industries, the impact of digitalisation on them and the European Union's Digital Single Market strategy, the article reveals how copyright policy and the underlying assumptions about 'copying' and 'creativity' express (often unexamined) political values and ideologies. Drawing on a close reading of policy statements, official reports, court cases and interviews with stakeholders, we explore the multiple political aspects of copyright, showing how copyright policy operates to privilege particular interests and practices and to acknowledge only specific forms of creative endeavour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European cities claim that the European Union falls short regarding their ‘recognition’, ‘representation’ and ‘participation’ at the policy-making process. Applying the multilevel system paradigm as a conceptual framework, this paper argues that the ongoing European political project allows for the existence of ‘informal governance’ arrangements that could circumvent shortcomings and vacuums generated by the rigidness of the legal framework. The aim of the research is to assess to what extent EU representatives’ personal attitudes could contribute to reduce cities’ lack of recognition, representation and participation. By carrying out in-depth semi-structured interviews with officials from the EU institutions and Eurocities, the study seeks to evaluate their ‘awareness’, ‘dialogical attitude’ and ‘participatory disposition’ concerning the improvement of cities’ influence at the European decision-making level. The research contributes to future academic analyses by identifying preliminary conditions of the scenario where the EU and cities interact. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the normative foundations of European integration. Topics discussed icnlude demands of positive political liberalism; loss of political autonomy as shown by the British withdrawal from the European Union; and demands of positive liberal supranationalism for creating the vision of political order.

An editorial is presented which discusses the publishing of a joint report on December 8, 2017 by the government negotiators of the European Union and Great Britain with regard to the Brexit initaitive and the European Union (EU) law. It highlights the areas under consideration in the report which include EU citizen rights, circumstances in Northern Ireland and financial statement methodology. Topics discussed include the EU legal order, Brexit negotiations and EU membership.

Despite growing interest in EU-level transnational networks, there is little understanding about how these form. This article investigates the formation of one network—the European Coalition for Vision (ECV). Using document analysis of 100 email exchanges, 12 semi-structured interviews, and observation of 5 ECV meetings, it identifies environmental and organizational triggers, most important to the creation of the ECV. Findings show that while environmental triggers played a role in ECV formation, organizational triggers were crucial. In particular, the presence of network leaders, a network entrepreneur and a network mentor were vital for the successful creation of the network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]