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Incumbent parties in Southern Europe experienced losses in their electoral support that came along with a series of economic reforms imposed by the EU and the IMF. However, recent theories of accountability would predict lower levels of economic voting given the limited room left for national governments to manoeuvre the economy. To resolve this puzzle, the paper presents and models quarterly vote intention time series data from Greece (2000–2012) and links it with the state of the economy. The empirical results show that after the bailout loan agreement Greek voters significantly shifted their assignment of responsibility for (economic) policy outcomes from the EU to the national government, which in turn heightened the impact of objective economic conditions on governing party support. The findings have implications for theories linking international structures, government constraints and democratic accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article provides a comparative analysis of core executive adaptation to engagement with the European Union in three states: Ireland, Greece and Finland. To date, the substantive focus of the literature on executive adaptation has been on the question of convergence or continuing divergence of national responses. The dominant conclusion points to the continuing divergence of national responses. The analytical framework that guided the empirical work in this paper was divided into two inter-related institutional components: structures and processes, and the agents who actively engage with the EU's governance structures. The comparative analysis provides evidence of both convergence and continuing diversity. In managing Europe from home, states appear to choose from a menu of possible models, prime ministerial-led or foreign ministry-led systems. Two variables stand out in explaining variation across the three states, the level of institutionalisation and the relationship between formal and informal processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a prerequisite to shape EU policies in day-to-day negotiations, states have to know what they want and have to quickly produce good instructions. This paper analyses how domestic coordination practices influence the timing and quality of national positions. Are some states in a better position to develop instructions quickly? Are some states more likely to end up with low quality positions? In effect, three factors are crucial to the production of timely and good instructions: good cooperation between Permanent Representations and the lead ministries, autonomous lead ministries that prioritise EU work and good inter-ministerial conflict resolution systems. States such as Luxembourg and Ireland are close to these ideal practices and tend to develop good instructions swiftly, while others, such as Greece and Cyprus, frequently end up with delayed and suboptimal instructions that make it difficult for them to actively participate in EU negotiations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the establishment of the National Health System in Greece in the early 1980s, the institutional framework remained largely unchanged due to opposition from interest groups and large set-up costs, thus allowing the powerful stakeholders to preserve their privileges. Not until almost two decades later was reform attempted in order to rationalise and modernise purchasing and delivery. The objective of this paper is to analyse the ambitious reform attempt of 2000 through the lens of rational choice institutionalism, identifying the initial goals of the reform, the reactions of the key stakeholders and the legislative outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the process of labour market reform in Greece since 1997, focusing in particular on the 2000 reform initiative launched by the then Socialist (PASOK) government. Despite powerful external and domestic pressures for change, the proposed labour market reform was eventually severely compromised following much acrimony between the government and the social partners. The aim of this article is to look at how this failure of initiative and response came about. In doing so, the article places its empirical analysis into a game theoretic framework that seeks to reveal both the structural characteristics of the '2000 labour market reform' game and the strategies followed by its main protagonists. Reference will also be made to actors' low trust and the failure of a 'winning' package deal to emerge. These, it will be argued, produced powerful blocks to reform and eventually transformed the 2000 reform initiative from a prisoner's dilemma to a deadlock game. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the role of expertise in the reform process in Greece by utilising the advocacy coalition framework. Knowledge, power and policy reform are discussed by comparing three frameworks that place knowledge in the centre of the analysis: advocacy coalitions, epistemic communities and policy transfer networks. The theoretical claims made in this paper are illustrated through a discussion of the 2001 constitutional reform and in particular the reform of article 24 on the environment and article 102 on decentralisation of public administration and the strengthening of regional governance. It is argued that the advocacy coalition is a useful framework for studying the role of experts in policy reform, although the framework could be strengthened if more emphasis was placed on political, economic and social interests and the way they form belief systems. In particular, regarding Greece it is claimed that the role of experts in policy reform has increased as part of a general move towards the modernisation of public administration in Greece. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is about party-system change in modern Greece and has two chief aims. First, it seeks to make sense of and explain the evolution of that country's party system from its early post-war years until today. Far from being 'frozen', the Greek party system has displayed continuous transformations from a system featuring significant party fragmentation into another characterized by the high concentration of its political forces. Second, the paper proposes a classification of the changes that took place during the development of the Greek party system. This classification will yield three distinct types of party system which developed in consecutive order, namely, a predominant-party system (from 1952 to 1963), a system of polarized pluralism (between 1963 and 1981), and a two-party system (since 1981). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article investigates why, despite similar background conditions, Greece has been the site of frequent, highly visible, fringe, anti-system politics and street riots, while similar phenomena are rare in Spain. Although the article's focal point is the eruption of the December 2008 riots in Athens, it sheds light on the two countries' diverse social reactions to the sovereign debt crisis. Deploying the tool of media framing, it argues that historical legacies and political cultures matter. In the Greek case, the transition to democracy shaped a political ‘culture of sympathy’ towards acts of resistance to the state, a culture that has been institutionalised since the mid-1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Greece, Portugal and Spain are among the countries worst hit by the 2008 Great Recession, followed by significant electoral and political turmoil. However, one of the dimensions in which they differ is the presence and varieties of populism in parties' political proposals. Drawing on holistic coding of party manifestos, we assess the varying presence of populist rhetoric in mainstream and challenger parties before and after the 2008 economic downturn. Our empirical findings show that populism is much higher in Greece compared to Spain and Portugal. We do not find a significant impact of the crisis as the degree of populism remains rather stable in Greece and Portugal, while it increases in Spain, mainly due to the rise of new populist forces. The study confirms that populist rhetoric is a strategy adopted mainly by challenger and ideologically radical parties. In addition, inclusionary populism is the predominant flavour of populist parties in new Southern Europe, although exclusionary populism is present to a lesser extent in the Greek case. We contend that the interaction between the national context – namely the ideological legacy of parties and the main dimensions of competition – and the strategic options of party leadership is crucial for explaining cross-country variation in the intensity of populism and the specific issues that characterise populist discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article talks about the parliamentary elections in Greece that were held in January and September 2015. Topics discussed include the two consecutive victories of the Coalition of Radical Left (SYRIZA) political party in Greece, the June 2012 parliamentary election in the country which brought together Greek political parties including New Democracy, Panhellenic Socialist Movement and the Democratic Left, and the economic downturn faced by the country.

The article discusses the Greek Parliamentary elections of 2012, including the participation of the political parties Panellinio Sosialistiko Kenema (Panhellenic Socialist Movement, PASOK), Nea Democratia (New Democracy, ND) and Synaspismos Rizospastikis Aristeras (Coalition of the Radical Left, SYRIZA). The impact that Greek economic conditions had on voting, including Greek attitudes towards the country's receipt of bailouts from the European Commission (EC), the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) (which are known as the troika), is discussed. An overview of the political persuasion of the Greek political parties involved in the 2012 elections, including right-wing, centre-right wing and centre-left wing parties, is provided.

Is there a typically Southern European model of healthcare? To answer this question it is not enough to find similarities between the Greek, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese health systems: it is also necessary that these similarities be in some way distinctive. For this reason the author compares these Southern European countries with other Western European countries, in particular those which, like the southern countries, have adopted a national health service. Notwithstanding the eccentricities of the Greek case, this comparison shows how the four healthcare systems share certain characteristics which effectively distinguish them from their Northern European counterparts. These traits are particularly evident in the birth of the national health service, the legacy of the previous health insurance system, the composition of healthcare costs, the rule of private hospitals, the entitlements of patients, and patients' level of satisfaction with the healthcare system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the comparative analysis of the implementation of structural policy, broadly conceived to include both the EU Structural Funds, namely the CSFs I, II and III, and the EU Cohesion Fund projects, the article focuses on the development of infrastructure, with emphasis on transport infrastructure, in Greece since the mid-1990s, as an outcome of policy learning, closely linked to the Europeanisation and modernisation processes. The underlying assumption is that the development of infrastructure, involving the shift in the goals of development policy between the first (1989-93), the second (1994-99) and the third (2000-06) CSFs from small-scale to major infrastructure projects in areas where the country was lagging behind, has primarily been the outcome of 'learning from past successes and failures' and 'learning from abroad' processes. These processes, however, were characterised by single loop rather than social learning features. This is attributed to the weaknesses of the domestic institutional infrastructure, and particularly to the lack of social capital and cooperative culture. Moreover, this seems to be a key variable differentiating Greece from other comparable Cohesion countries, notably Ireland and Portugal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dominant characteristic of the process of pension reform in Greece is policy immobility: key measures rationalising the public PAYG pension system have been characterised as 'extremely urgent' for the last half-century and remain so today. This policy immobility — or 'reform by instalments' — is explained on the basis of key structural features of the Greek pension system, chief amongst which is fragmentation. These features allow short-termism of political actors to thwart reform efforts and to rely on external stimuli to initiate progress. Experience since the mid-1990s, despite some early promise, has largely confirmed traditional patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Privatisation in Greece represented a reversal of the entire post-war and post-authoritarian interventionist policy paradigm. The privatisation decision resulted from pressures associated with the EC/EU and globalisation in general. The Simitis governments reactivated a privatisation programme comparable to that of ND in the early 1990s, but distinctly pragmatic in its reasoning, gradualist in its pace, and nonconflictual though unilateralist in its policy implementation. A central feature of the 'Simitis privatisations' was the flotation of successive minority stakes in public enterprises leading to retention of public control even though the government kept only a minority stake in the privatised enterprises. Privatisation was most far-reaching in the banking sector, with important broader implications for the entire economy. Despite the remarkably more favourable overall conditions under which the Simitis governments implemented privatisation as compared to the ND government in the early 1990s, privatisation policies continued to provide ad hoc opportunities for considerable sociopolitical opposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the emergence of European norms and institutions of human rights and their impact on domestic policies and practices pertaining to citizenship and minorities in Greece. Since the beginning of the 1990s, with an intensification of Europeanisation processes in Greece, government policy towards minorities has undergone a process of liberalisation that culminated with the abrogation of Article 19 of the Greek Citizenship Code (GCC) in 1998, on which this article focuses. It presents an empirical analysis of the process that led to the abrogation of Article 19 of the GCC and it is primarily interested in the role European institutions played in it. Was its elimination a product of the reconfiguration of traditional Greek conceptions of citizenship and minorities, or was it an instance of instrumental change taking place within the given frame of national interests and identities? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the strategic and political parameters influencing the ways in which the main economic interest groups become involved in policy in contemporary Greece. The fact that social dialogue in Greece remains an exercise with a limited scope has been largely due to the fact that there is a difficult match between Greece's 'disjointed corporatism' and the EU's emerging 'competitive corporatism'. A number of European trade unions have agreed to a new 'competitive bargain', which is asymmetrical but which gives them the opportunity to get involved in 'competitive corporatism'. Greek responses to this trend have been inconclusive: while there are clearly pockets within union leaderships which would welcome the opportunity to approve the basic liberalising goals in exchange for guarantees for established workers and participation in the political framing of their implementation, the structural features of the Greek interest intermediation system work against such a possibility. Whether this leads to an evolving 'segmented pluralism' or another form remains to be seen — the extent of the synchronicity of developments with other EU states will depend in part on the outcome of this transition. In previous decades, the country's transition from asymmetric state corporatism to disjointed corporatism went through the contours of an embracing strategy of Europeanisation. It is an open question whether an equivalent strategy for the twenty-first century will be able to restructure the sociopolitical scene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Greek political parties have proved their ability to survive and to overcome political crises. The performance of the party system during the last 30 years confirms the argument that the third Greek Republic is a consolidated democratic regime and leads to a general consensus about the viability of democracy. However, there is no agreement about the quality of democracy, the nature of the party system, its specific characteristics and the political - ideological as well as the analytical - classification of the political parties. Moreover, the analytical tools and the theoretical schemes employed in the study of Greek politics vary, thus providing the basis for a discussion with both theoretical and practical implications. The following pages seek to pinpoint the major issues in the study of Greek party politics and to assess the usefulness of the concepts and the validity of the arguments developed during the last 30 years. The aim is twofold: first to reassess the concepts and ideas that have dominated the study of modern Greek politics and second to present the cultural and political context within which political parties operate and to discuss the possible future developments. Thus, we may be able to reach some tentative conclusions about the party system, which, as most party systems, undergoes significant change, yet retains remarkable continuity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary Greek politics are marked by tensions between pressures for reform and the structural constraints to their realisation. The pressures combine those emanating from processes of Europeanisation (European Union agendas on economic reform, for example) and the domestic demand for 'modernisation' (the agenda of former Premier Simitis). The two have been seen as synonymous in Greece. The resultant tensions have created a fundamental issue of governability: in a number of areas, Greece is une société bloqué. There are systemic weaknesses deriving from the institutional capacity of the state, the regime of 'disjointed corporatism', and cultural practices of clientelism and 'rent-seeking'. These constrain agency and leadership strategies. The analysis places the recent Simitis project in an historical context and attempts to delineate patterns of change and continuity. The reform process has been asymmetrical and uncertain in character. The problem of governance remains and, in turn, it questions the nature of Greece's convergence with the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After prolonged stagnation in the 1980s and early 1990, Greece during the past decade or so has experienced a change from its post-war statist economic policy paradigm towards a liberal model. Focusing on political and political-economic aspects, this article gives an account of the reform of state interventionism in the 1990s. Different hypotheses are consistent with explaining distinct aspects of this policy change. The general interest and Europeanisation hypotheses are mainly borne out by macroeconomic stabilisation measures, but they cannot explain failure or delay in structural adjustment. The latter are better understood on the basis of public choice institutionalism and approaches emphasising uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]