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The Politics of Antitrust and Merger Review in the European Union: Institutional Change and Decisions from Messina to 2004. CES Working Paper, no. 142, 2007

Buthe, Tim, and Swank, Gabriel T. (2007) The Politics of Antitrust and Merger Review in the European Union: Institutional Change and Decisions from Messina to 2004. CES Working Paper, no. 142, 2007. [Working Paper]

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    Abstract

    Antitrust regulation and the related merger review are essential for making a market economy work. Mer-ger review is also among the most prominent powers of the European Commission in the Common Market of the EU. How did this supranational actor come to acquire such power? And what explains the variation in the Commission's decisions in some of the trans-atlantically most controversial merger review cases in recent years? In this paper, we develop a modified neofunctionalist theory as a historical institutionalist the-ory of institutional change that integrates elements of rational choice and social constructivism. We argue that it provides a superior explanation of (1) the institutional development of the European Commission’s competence over antitrust matters and merger review from the 1950s negotiations over the Treaty of Rome through the changes of 2004 and (2) the Commission’s decisions in some of the most prominent cases, where a high level of politicization makes a neofunctionalist explanation least likely.

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    Item Type: Working Paper
    Subjects for non-EU documents: EU policies and themes > Policies & related activities > competition policy
    Other > integration theory (see also researching and writing the EU in this section)
    Subjects for EU documents: UNSPECIFIED
    EU Series and Periodicals: UNSPECIFIED
    EU Annual Reports: UNSPECIFIED
    Series: Series > Harvard University, Center for European Studies > CES Working Papers/Open Forum
    Depositing User: Phil Wilkin
    Official EU Document: No
    Language: English
    Date Deposited: 18 Sep 2008
    Page Range: p. 52
    Last Modified: 15 Feb 2011 17:58
    URI: http://aei.pitt.edu/id/eprint/9018

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