| Competition policy, or antitrust as it is called in the United States, is an essential part of the institutional framework necessary for the proper functioning of market oriented democratic states. This research pursues the substantive policy issue of variation in competition policy across countries by conceptualizing competition policy within institutional frameworks or regimes. Regimes structure action in policy arenas by providing rules, norms, principles, and decision-making procedures in a given issue area. This dissertation examines variation in the organization of competition policy, as well as how institutional structure shapes sources of influence in the policy process.; This research contributes to our understanding of institutions and policy implementation by studying the role of information in policymaking and the significance of the decision context. Information plays a key, but largely unexamined, role in policy-making, although government transparency has generated increasing interest among scholars and policy makers. I argue that the full range of activities associated with information in the policy process---collecting, using and disseminating information, which I group together in the term "information handling"---shape the availability of access points for different actors, with important effects on how issues are constructed. Furthermore, the "decision context"---the type of dispute resolution activity featured most prominently in the policy process---interacts with information handling to create, at least in the industrialized countries studied, discrete types or configurations of competition policy systems in different national settings.; I examine competition policy and its implementation through two qualitative case studies of US and EU merger evaluation. I also provide an analysis of competition policy and information handling in the OECD countries. The evidence draws from a wide range of data, including interviews, participant observation, a new dataset provided by the OECD, and official government reports and secondary sources. Among the major findings of this dissertation are that information collection in the US and EU show considerable variation, while information dissemination is fairly similar. Furthermore, according to analysis of OECD countries, transparency and public participation in decision-making are not correlated. These findings suggest new directions for diverse literatures on transparency and public policy making, particularly for competition policy. |
