1 - Shareholder Voting and Engagement

Summary

The chapter lays a roadmap for the Handbook on Shareholder Engagement and Voting. It defines shareholder engagement as shareholders’ involvement with their investee companies, using their shareholder rights and powers, both formal and informal (such as voting rights), to influence corporate affairs inside and outside general meetings of shareholders. The chapter further discusses the Handbook’s overall methodological considerations, that is, a sophisticated functionalist approach, with a combined use of doctrinal and empirical methods. The chapter proceeds to elaborate on the framework of research questions that guide the Handbook’s chapter contributions on 19 jurisdictions around the globe. The framework comprises three groups of questions: general jurisdictional features, legal means of shareholder voting and engagement, as well as shareholder voting and engagement in practice. The chapter concludes with a brief outline of the Handbook’s structure.