Transatlantic Competition Policy: Domestic and International Sources of EU-US Cooperation

This article employs a cross-level approach to explain cooperation in transatlantic competition policy. The explanation reveals the important role of regulators as interfaces between the domestic and international levels of analysis. Economic internationalization is a system-level cause of this cooperation, the precise effect of which is accounted for by an intervening variable (domestic politics), which is simplified with a principal-agent model. The negotiations over the 1991 EU-US Bilateral Competition Agreement suggest that, while regulators remain constrained by domestic institutions, they play an important role in explaining why the formal, transatlantic cooperative framework is largely a discretionary one created by a non-treaty international agreement.