Why Greece failed

Journal of Democracy

Volumn 24, Issue 2, 2013, Pages 31-45

  Pappas, Takis S ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MACEDONIA   (Greece)

^b EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE   (Italy)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84876218686     PISSN: 10455736     EISSN: 10863214     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jod.2013.0035     Document Type: Article

References (27)

1. By 2008, Greece was one of the world's thirty richest countries and ranked 22nd in the Economist's Index of Democracy; that is, only one rank below the United Kingdom and above France, Portugal, and Italy.
2. See, for example, Robert Kaplan, "For Greece's Economy, Geography Was Destiny, " New York Times, 24 April 2010
3. Peter Oborne, "Some European Countries Are in the Habit of Going Bankrupt, " Telegraph, 24 March 2011
4. Richard Cohen, "The Great Greek Illusion, " New York Times, 20 June 2011.
5. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (New York: Crown, 2012), 364, 398.
6. The liberal conception of representative democracy requires admitting the multidimensionality of cleavages in society; seeking consensus; and stressing constitutionalism and the rule of law. The populist model of democracy, by contrast, features the idea of a society riven by a single cleavage ostensibly dividing "the people" from some entrenched elite; views politics as a zero-sum game; and hews to majoritarianism and the logic of "winner takes all. " And as William H. Riker correctly pointed out, liberalism and populism "exhaust all the possibilities for democratic theory. " See his Liberalism Against Populism (New York: Waveland, 1982), 241.
7. Cited in Takis S. Pappas, Making Party Democracy in Greece (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 40.
8. Pappas, Making Party Democracy in Greece, 147.
9. Vassilis Fouskas, "The Muffled Voice of the New PASOK: Reflections on Neo-Revisionist Socialism in Greece, " South European Society and Politics 3 (March 1998): 130-41.
10. Stathis Kalyvas, George Pagoulatos, and Haridimos Tsoukas, eds., From Stagnation to Forced Adjustment: Reform in Greece, 1974-2010 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 2.
11. Michael Mitsopoulos and Theodore Pelagidis, Understanding the Crisis in Greece: From Boom to Bust (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
12. Herbert Kitschelt and Steven I. Wilkinson, eds., Patrons, Clients, and Policies: Patterns of Democratic Accountability and Political Competition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
13. Polyxeni Triantafyllou, "Greece: Political Competition in a Majoritarian System, " in Ellen M. Immergut, Karen M. Anderson, and Isabelle Schulze, eds., Handbook of West European Pension Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 122.
14. The data in this section are taken from OECD, Greece at a Glance: Policies for a Sustainable Recovery (Paris: OECD, n.d.).
15. Greece, for instance, has 40,000 lawyers, or one for every 250 citizens, when in Germany the ratio is one for every 593 and in France one for every 1,403. In Greece there is one notary for every 3,446 citizens, whereas in France there is one for every 7,287, in Italy one for every 12,023, and in Austria one for every 17,926. And Greece has one pharmacy for every 950 people, when the European average is one for every 4,000. Belgium has the second-largest ratio with one drugstore for every 2,450. These figures appeared in the Athens newspaper Kathimerini on 10 August 2010.
16. Aristos Doxiadis, "The Real Greek Economy: Owners, Rentiers and Opportunists, " openDemocracy. net, 23 September 2010.
17. A similar type of intentional polarization in today's Venezuela has been analyzed in Javier Corrales and Michael Penfold, "Venezuela: Crowding Out the Opposition, " Journal of Democracy 18 (April 2007): 99-113. See also their Dragon in the Tropics: Hugo Chávez and the Political Economy of Revolution in Venezuela (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2011).
18. See also their Dragon in the Tropics: Hugo Chávez and the Political Economy of Revolution in Venezuela (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2011).
19. Takis S. Pappas, "The Transformation of the Greek Party System Since 1951, " West European Politics 26 (April 2003): 90-114.
20. In populist democracy, the space for electoral competition between the populist parties becomes so large, and so sparsely populated by liberal-minded voters, that it becomes a graveyard full of smaller parties that, in effect, died of moderation. In Greece, about a dozen such parties have tried in recent decades to grow between PASOK and ND, only to wilt after an election or two.
21. Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper, 1957).
22. Giovanni Sartori, Parties and Party Systems: A Framework of Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 191.
23. Sartori, Parties and Party Systems, 192.
24. See Bruce Gilley, The Right to Rule: How States Win and Lose Legitimacy (New York, Columbia University Press, 2009)
25. Gretchen Helmke and Steven Levitsky, "Informal Institutions and Comparative Politics: A Research Agenda, " Perspectives on Politics 2 (December 2004): 725-40.
26. Autocratic or neopatrimonial systems are different, of course: There is no shared contract and the expectation is that the state exists not to serve the public good but to be a tool for the short-term enrichment of the predatory few.
27. Morris P. Fiorina and Kenneth A. Shepsle, "Formal Theories of Leadership: Agents, Agenda Setters, and Entrepreneurs, " in Bryan D. Jones, ed., Leadership and Politics: New Perspectives in Political Science (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989), 18.