Independence and accountability of independent regulatory agencies: the case of Turkey Tamer C ¸ etin • M. Zahid Sobacı • Mehmet Nargelec ¸ekenler Published online: 11 December 2013 Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013 Abstract For a long time, governments have delegated their regulatory powers to independent regulatory agencies (IRAs). The aim is to reduce transaction costs and to ensure a credible commitment in the regulatory institutional structure. This paper discusses transition to IRAs in Turkey in terms of independence and accountability. To this aim, we firstly analyze the institutional foundations of transition to IRAs in Turkey from a political economy perspective and then measure their formal inde- pendence levels. We find that the pragmatic policies of the incumbent government regarding IRAs negatively influence their independence. This injures the credibility of regulatory commitment and increases the political transaction costs of regulatory process in Turkey. Keywords Regulatory agencies Á Transaction costs Á Credible commitment Á Independence Á Accountability JEL Classification D02 Á H11 Á K23 Á L38 1 Introduction Recently, a new state model has become popular in the literature of law and economics. This new model that is called ‘regulatory state’ refers to the market T. C ¸ etin (&) Univeristy of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA e-mail: tamer.cetin@yahoo.com T. C ¸ etin Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey M. Z. Sobacı Á M. Nargelec ¸ekenler Uludag University, Bursa, Turkey 123 Eur J Law Econ (2016) 41:601–620 DOI 10.1007/s10657-013-9432-x