In (eds) Fuat Keyman, Nihan Akyelken and Evren Tok, The Political Economy of Turkey: Development of New State Spaces, Edward Elgar (forthcoming). Chapter 5. Investigating Turkey’s Neoliberal Experience: ‘Competition’ in Turkey Tamer Çetin YTU, Turkey UC, Berkeley, USA Preliminary Draft 11.16.2013 Abstract Although Turkey’s regulatory structure largely changed with the post -1980 reforms, it brought about some issues as well. After the 1980 liberalization reform, Turkey tried to introduce competition into many industries. However, network industries have remained as monopolies. On the other hand, the Constitutional Court and the Higher Court of Appeals resisted privatizations during the 1990s. In the beginning of the 2000s, Turkey initiated transition to the regulatory state including regulation and competition of network industries by establishing independent regulatory agencies (IRAs). The regulatory reform started during the incumbent coalition government. Later, the AKP (the post-2002 incumbent government) government was supportive of the regulatory reform at the beginning. However, it has consistently pushed for a more centralist position in some cases, and a more liberal one in others. The chapter aims to analyze transition to the regulatory state in Turkey and the regulatory reform in the selected network industries such as electricity, natural gas, telecommunications, and airlines industries during the post-2001 term. In doing so, it targets to show the success of regulatory reform in the last decade and to reveal its current issues. Keywords: Regulatory State, Regulation, Competition, IRAs, Turkey 1. Introduction In the 1980s, Turkey initiated a liberalization and deregulation movement to introduce competition to its domestic markets and to transform the Turksih economy from an import susbstituting economy to export-based one. The aim was to institutionalize economic change through transition to the economic institutions of capitalism. However, the traditional institutional structure had resisted the process of institutionalization of economic change until the 2000s. Liberalization did not bring about a relaxation in the traditional and statist institutional environment. In the 1980s, institutional structure was not ready for the transition. In the 1990s, Turkey suffered from the loose political structure with coalition governments and the resistance of tradinitional bureaucracy and judiciary environments to the transition. As a result, the reform initiatives were not able to lead to the transition to the economic institutions of capitalism based on institutionalization in the political, bureaucratic, and legal spheres.