Rocking the Cradle of Democracy

Elections are considered the hallmark of representative democracy. Their essential function is to allow voters to hold existing politicians accountable and to select their future representatives. Yet, the true quality of a democracy is not in direct proportion to the number of elections and electoral contests.

Greece: The Erosion of National Democratic Politics

The results of the May 6 parliamentary elections have heralded the end of an era in its post-dictatorial democratic politics (metapolitefsi) characterized by alternation in power by two catch-all parties, cartelization of government, and heavy statism. The people have expressed a strong aversion to established political elites of the center-left PASOK and the center-right New Democracy (whose respective vote shares added up to 32%, less than half of their sum total in the 2009 elections). The rise of SYRIZA, a pre-electoral coalition of left-wing movements, has been the major story so far. However, the existing electoral system – designed by New Democracy in 2006 as a buttress for an entrenched two-party system and stable single-party government – has led to a significant distortion of the democratic will in terms of the translation of vote shares into seats (New Democracy gained more than a third of the seats with only 19% of the vote).

National Democracy in Crisis – Lessons from the Greek Elections

The Greek political system has come under intense scrutiny in the past few months. The two successive electoral contests that took place on May 6 and June 17 opened a Pandora’s box, so to say, of democratic ailments: extremism, populism, witch-hunting, and fearmongering. Viewed from the perspective of five successive years of recession, unprecedented levels of austerity, and acute economic uncertainty, this should come as no surprise. The interested observer will of course also wonder about possible contagion effects, not only with respect to Greece’s economic woes but also its political maladies. The logical path of inquiry into this question will have to address the root causes of the unfolding crisis and the extent to which they are idiosyncratic, systemic, or a combination of both. My goal in this article is to examine the latest election results as manifestations of either systemic or endemic democratic trends.

A Greek tragedy in three acts: A dilemma, an oxymoron and a leap of faith

There are times when academic witticisms really hit the nail on the head. When the organisers of the latest instalment of the Greek Public Policy Forum decided on headlining the Nottingham meeting “No Country for Old Systems”, they surely could not have predicted the tragic irony that their intended pun now encapsulates. On 3^rd April a 77 year old retired pharmacist puts a gun to his head and commits suicide in the middle of Syntagma square. In a dramatically lucid suicide note he explained that the only act of resistance left to him before ending up looking for food in the trash, was a dignified end of his own choosing. While the jury is still out on what will happen to countries with “old systems” that fail to meet the standards of the global free market, Greece appears to be rapidly becoming “no country for old men”. If soaring youth unemployment, gender inequality indices and the growing waves of emigration are added to the equation, it is doubtful whether younger men and women will fare any better for the foreseeable future.

Redesigning the Architecture of Greek Local Government

The ongoing European debt crisis has singled out the peripheral economies of the European South by shedding light on their latent pathologies and malfunctions. Often viewed as an epitome of a ‘Mediterranean’ model of political and economic organization, Greece gave utmost expression to those ills pertaining to a weak and inefficient social contract. The Greek post-dictatorial political economic system has been marked by an explosive mix of statism, welfarism, and popular distrust of public institutions that eventually gave way to a downward spiral of state degradation and social degeneration. The country has thus been trapped in a self-enforcing vicious cycle of low state (fiscal and legal) capacity, high policy implementation costs, and depreciating social capital.