On 10 June 2019 the transposition and implementation deadline for the shareholder engagement rules imposed upon institutional investors and asset managers by the revised Shareholder Rights Directive (SRD II) expired. This article offers an original account of the rationale, the dynamics and the evolution of this EU-driven policy, which aims to promote long-term institutional shareholder engagement within (or in the absence of) nationally embedded frameworks. We place the SRD II shareholder engagement rules within what we see as a multi-layered regulatory landscape consisting in some Member States of soft-law stewardship codes or similar principles and guidelines, and we find—perhaps surprisingly—that the SRD II stewardship-related provisions were transposed in a literal and minimalistic fashion without any customization to divergent national specifications and despite the fact that the SRD II is only a minimum harmonization directive. We search for explanations for this transposition pattern by pointing to three key issues: the policy and institutional misfit between the harmonized rules and national regimes, the lack of a strong market demand for shareholder stewardship, and the more apt soft, flexible and mostly bottom-up norms (contained in codes or similar principles and guidelines)—rather than (semi-)hard top-down rules—in inculcating good shareholder stewardship practices. Against this background of minimalist intervention (both at the EU and national levels), we find that pre-SRD II soft stewardship initiatives have had two key positive effects. First, they increased market actors’ familiarity and preparedness with the SRD II transposed rules, thereby increasing the likelihood of effective compliance with good shareholder stewardship standards whilst maintaining national idiosyncrasies. Second, soft-law stewardship codes or similar principles and guidelines, despite their own weaknesses, are vital mechanisms of innovative norm-generation and can expand or adjust the SRD II stewardship-related rules to provide tailored shareholder stewardship frameworks and serve as a signalling function for key market actors. From this it follows that the uniform, but minimalistic, transposition of the SRD II stewardship-related rules across the EU, although welcome in shaping the minimum standards, needs to be supported by tailored, soft-law stewardship codes or similar principles and guidelines. Such a symbiosis of the harmonized SRD II shareholder engagement rules and supporting soft-law stewardship developments will allow the tailoring of shareholder stewardship norms to local conditions and the provision of guidance and meaning to the SRD II rules, while a minimum harmonization of shareholder stewardship is already secured.

经修订的《股东权利指令》（SRD II）对机构投资者和资产管理人施加的股东参与规则的转换和实施截止日期已到期。本文提供了这一由欧盟驱动的政策的原理，动态和演变的原始说明，该政策旨在促进​​在国家嵌入框架内（或不存在）的长期机构股东参与。我们将SRD II股东参与规则置于我们认为是多层监管的环境中，该环境由一些拥有软法管理守则或类似原则和准则的成员国组成，并且我们发现-令人惊讶的是-尽管与SRD II只是最低限度的统一指令，但与SRD II管理相关的条款却以字面意义和简约的方式进行了转换，没有针对不同的国家规范进行任何自定义。我们通过指出以下三个关键问题来寻找这种转变模式的解释：协调规则与国家制度之间的政策和体制失衡，缺乏对股东管理的强烈市场需求以及更为贴切，软，灵活且大多为低谷的-灌输良好的股东管理做法，而不是（半）严格的自上而下的规则（包含在守则或类似的原则和指南中）制定规范。在最低限度干预的背景下（欧盟和国家层面），我们发现，SRD II之前的软管理举措具有两个关键的积极影响。首先，他们增加了市场参与者对SRD II转换规则的熟悉程度和准备程度，从而增加了有效遵守良好股东管理标准同时保持国家特质的可能性。第二，软法管理守则或类似的原则和准则尽管有自身的弱点，但却是创新规范生成的重要机制，可以扩展或调整与SRD II管理相关的规则，以提供量身定制的股东管理框架，并起到信号传递的作用。针对主要市场参与者。由此得出结论，尽管在制定最低标准方面受到欢迎，但整个欧盟对SRD II管理权规则的统一但简约的转换，需要由量身定制的软法管理守则或类似的原则和准则来支持。统一SRD II股东参与规则和支持软法管理发展的这种共生关系将允许根据当地条件定制股东管理规范，并为SRD II规则提供指导和含义，而最小化股东管理则是已经安全了。