If society were a vehicle, its institutions would be its ‘engine’; they are the basic means by which society strives to reach prosperity and to protect itself against the fickle vagaries of the global capitalist system. Institutional failure is often viewed as a coordination failure within society. Greece represents a glaring such example of a country that attracted the ‘unwanted’ attention of capital market investors and speculators in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, giving way to an unprecedented debt crisis in this part of the European periphery. The decline in the quality of its institutions (political, economic, judicial, social, etc.) came as a result of the shakiness of their foundations; Greek institutions have for the most part been externally imposed and implanted into an arid soil of low social capital, trust, and state capacity. The gradual erosion of the social contract has generated deep mistrust of the ‘top-down’ institutions of representative democracy and, therefore, weakened the elites’ capacity to reform them.
