This chapter examines the specific features that made US antitrust and EU competition law particularly conducive to a republican understanding of economic liberty and translated the structural goal of preserving a polycentric market structure into concrete competition policy. It sheds light on how the ideal of republican liberty and the idea of a competition–democracy nexus were given shape through a specific legal modus operandi, such as the structure of legal commands, standards of assessments, and institutional principles. The chapter identifies the (i) extensive use of broadly construed rule-like presumptions of anticompetitiveness, a (ii) possibilist standard of harm, and (iii) a precautionary error–cost framework erring in the case of doubt on the side of over-deterrence (type I errors) as the main channels of republican antitrust in the US and EU. These legal filters can be considered the main parameters or policy levers of a distinctive republican approach towards antitrust law and policy.

This chapter explores how different proponents of the idea of a competition–democracy nexus envisaged the opertationalisation of the twin-goal of republican liberty and democracy through the protection of competitive markets as an institution of antipower. Various republican antitrust paradigms shared the idea that competitive markets operate as an institution of antipower that maximises liberty as non-domination and promotes republican democracy as long as they diffuse economic power polycentrically amongst a multitude of independent economic agents. Based on this assumption, all iterations of the competition–democracy nexus saw the role of legal rules and, most notably, competition law as securing a polycentric and deconcentrated market structure. The various republican antitrust paradigms also envisaged different ways through which competition law can guarantee and preserve polycentric competitive markets. These design approaches can be largely divided into two categories: situational and conduct-based structuralism.