Modern Greek Politics

The onset of the economic crisis and the austerity measures outlined in the EU\IMF bailout were followed by a series of large-scale protests in Greece. The continuous mobilization, for several weeks, of the Indignant Citizens was a distinct part of the overall events during this period. In this article, we focus on the mass mobilization of protesters who occupied Syntagma Square in May-June 2011. For our analysis, we conducted semi-structured interviews with the protesters involved in the mobilization. Focusing on their political attitudes, the article approaches their perspectives on democracy. Our results suggest that the Indignants’ acceptance of an idealized form of democracy on the one hand, and the distrust of parliamentary practices, actors and performance on the other, signify a demand for a new politics beyond the framework of representative democracy. Disappointment with representative politics and the glorification of direct democracy constitute the most important facets of this mobilization which left its mark on the Greek political scene.

How do children encounter and relate to public life? Drawing on evidence from ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2014 and 2016 for the ERC-funded Connectors Study on the relationship between childhood and public life, this paper explores how children encounter public life in their everyday family environments. Using the instance of political talk as a practice through which public life is encountered in the home, the data presented fill important gaps in knowledge about the lived experience of political talk of younger children. Working with three family histories where political talk was reported by parents to be a practice encountered in their own childhoods and one which they continued in the present amongst themselves as a couple/parents, we make two arguments: that children’s political talk, where it occurs, is idiomatic and performative; and that what is transmitted across generations is the practice of talking politics. Drawing on theories of everyday life developed by Michel de Certeau and others we explore the implications of these findings for the dominant social imaginaries of conversation, and for how political talk is researched.

KEYWORDS: Political talk, socialisation, childhood, generation, transmission, comparative ethnography

Interrogating available indexes from a discourse-theoretical point of view, this paper utilizes a reformulated populism index in order to identify populist parties. In particular, the index is applied in a candidate survey carried out in Greece in 2015. Findings indicate that this index allows for a clear differentiation between populist and non-populist parties. Based on candidate attitudes, SYRIZA and ANEL belong to the first group whereas New Democracy, PASOK and River to the second. The examination of additional survey items reveals a clear ideological division within the populist camp: right-wing populism is exclusionary, while left-wing populism more inclusive and pluralist.

The past few years have seen an unexpected resurgence of street-level protest movements around the world, from the rise of anti-austerity protests in Spain, Greece, and Israel to the global spread of the Occupy movement. This collection is designed to offer a comparative analysis of these movements, setting them in international, socioeconomic , and cross-cultural perspective in order to help us understand why movements emerge, what they do, how they spread, and how they fit into both local and worldwide historical contexts. As the most significant wave of mass protests in decades continues apace,

The economic crisis has meant that radical left parties in Europe have been faced with changing socio-economic environments. In this study we deal with the questions of how European radical left parties have responded to the crisis in terms of their societal mobilization strategies and explaining their responses. Discussions in the relevant literature advocate that party-specific characteristics matter greatly as to how parties mobilize in society and establish relations with social groups in times of stability. But do they continue to be as important at times of dramatic change, when new realities emerge in society? We interrogate the cases of the Greek (KKE and SYN), Irish (Sinn Féin), Portuguese (PCP and Bloco) and Spanish (PCE/IU) radical left parties, which are alike at the country level but exhibit differences at the party level. Utilizing data from an original expert survey, we show that both ideology and organizational legacy throw considerable light on the observed variation among the six RLPs’ societal responses to the crisis. In this way, they ensure continuity rather than change.

This paper aims at exploring the state of centre-left politics in Greece and Turkey by focusing on the transformation of the two leading centre-left parties in the two countries, the Greek Panhellenic Socialist Movement (Panellinio Sosialistiko Kinima—PASOK) and the Turkish Republican People's Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi—CHP). Such a comparison is warranted for a number of reasons, despite size discrepancy and religious differences between the two countries. Both Greece and Turkey emerged from the Ottoman Empire and share to a considerable degree a legacy of top-down and crisis-ridden modernization. In both countries, a reformist and an underdog1 culture clashed, thus making modernization the product of the compromise between the two. In the case of Greece, PASOK has succeeded in ruling Greece for more than 20 years. While the party emerged in the 1970s with nationalist, anti-imperialist third-worldist elements, it was able to gradually move to the centre of the political spectrum in the mid-1990s and become a trigger of political reform. This process peaked during the Simitis administration, in which Greece regained its lost international prestige as ‘the European country of the Balkans’ and was able to fulfil the economic criteria for its membership in the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). While still appealing to old slogans and rhetoric, the Simitis administration attempted to break old nationalist taboos on issues relating to Greek foreign and security policy. The early Simitis era became an ample example of how a centre-left party could form a greater winning social alliance, appeal to the winners of globalization and achieve high economic growth, while not compromising its social justice agenda. In the case of CHP, the party increasingly distanced itself from its social democratic legacy. Failing to win political power, it was trapped into a defensive nationalist, anti-globalization and anti-reformist political agenda spearheaded by the question of secularism. The consolidation of Turkish democracy and the promotion of human and minority rights lost their significance, and the CHP emerged as Turkey's leading nationalist and anti-reform party, questioning the country's European vocation and tolerating military interventions into Turkish politics. The diminution of the CHP into a party of the ‘secularist middle class’ has deprived it of any chances to lead a winning social coalition and lead Turkey's political reform. This paper will seek conclusions on the future of centre-left politics in Turkey based on the Greek experience.

In this paper we present the findings of research designed to test if and how populist attitudes among political elites as well as voters (supply and demand) can be measured by including a battery of items in a survey questionnaire producing particular indices. Combining these two perspectives regarding populist attitudes may enhance our ability to assess the position of each political actor and its constituency within the political system. From this point of view, our inquiry unfolds along two complementary axes: (a) do parties (supply side) that are identified as ‘populist’ present a distinct discursive profile that can be quantitatively measured towards the public/voters?, and (b) do the voters of populist and other parties (supply side) present attitudes that can be clearly related to a populist or a non-populist outlook?

BOOK ABSTRACT: Party Patronage and Party Government in European Democracies brings together insights from the worlds of party politics and public administration in order to analyze the role of political parties in public appointments across contemporary Europe. Based on an extensive new data gathered through expert interviews in fifteen European countries, this book offers the first systematic comparative assessment of the scale of party patronage and its role in sustaining modern party governments. Among the key findings are: First, patronage appointments tend to be increasingly dominated by the party in public office rather than being used or controlled by the party organization outside parliament. Second, rather than using appointments as rewards, as used to be the case in more clientelistic systems in the past, parties are now more likely to emphasize appointments that can help them to manage the infrastructure of government and the state. In this way patronage becomes an organizational rather than an electoral resource. Third, patronage appointments are increasingly sourced from channels outside of the party, thus helping to make parties look increasingly like network organizations, primarily constituted by their leaders and their personal and political hinterlands.