Competition Agencies in the age of democratic backsliding: Cases of Hungary, Mexico and Turkey

Many emerging countries have experienced the rise and partial demise of regulatory states within the last three decades. Regulatory agencies that were established in these countries starting from the 1990s have been subject to a broad range of challenges since the 2010s, coinciding with regional and global crises. As a result, they have gone through reforms to different extents, tightly linked to the notable shifts of political regimes in the respective countries. Focusing on competition authorities, this paper examines the major shifts these agencies have been subject to against the backdrop of democratic backsliding. Based on the empirics of Hungary, Mexico and Turkey, the paper unpacks the motives and strategies employed by the governments to interfere in the competition agencies and the proceedings of the respective competition policies. Drawing on in-depth interviews conducted in these three countries as well as archival research, it analyzes varying forms of interference and capture of the competition authorities facilitated by the degrees of democratic backsliding ushered in by populist governments. The paper demonstrates how the erosion of competition policy has been enabled by backsliding and how, in turn, the instrumentalization of the competition policy bolsters the ongoing backsliding-cum-autocratization. It discusses the implications of this process where manipulation of the competition agencies by political actors becomes an essential tool for the survival of the populist regimes with increasingly more authoritarian overtones.