Sources of tolerance towards corrupted politicians in Greece: the role of trade offs and individual benefits

Reelection of corrupted politicians points to a problem of democratic accountability. Voters do have the chance to ‘throw the rascals out’, but they do not take it. Employing a survey experiment, we test two popular explanations of why Greek voters fail to effectively sanction corrupt politicians. One is related to the distorting effects of psychological attachment to parties and the second to tradeoffs that seem to come into play when voters weigh the prevalence of corruption against other tangible benefits that they receive from governments and parties, such as lower taxes or clientelistic exchanges. Our findings suggest that collective benefits, such as cutting taxes, outweigh the costs of tolerating political corruption. On the contrary, exclusive provision of goods to specific voters, such as in the case of clientelistic exchanges, seems to be negatively related to support for a corrupt politician and therefore should rather not be regarded as a source of tolerance to corruption, at least not in present time Greece.     

Appropriating Nature in Crisis-ridden Greece: Deepening Neoliberal Capitalism,Part 2

This is the second paper in a two-paper series in which we present how the ongoing crisis in Greece has been used to accelerate the neoliberal restructuring of Greece with serious implications for the appropriation of nature. In this paper we focus specifically on particular aspects of the austerity programs that relate to natural resources and natural conditions. We examine changes to the business environment and ongoing privatization schemes to show how the Greek austerity programs benefited private capital with significant concessions of natural resources. By discussing relevant specific cases, we concretely show how austerity programs have had far-reaching adverse consequences for the living conditions of working people and their access to natural resources.     

Gradualism and uncertainty in international union formation: The European Community’s first enlargement

This paper introduces a new theoretical framework of international unions qua coalitions of countries adopting a common policy and common supranational institutions. I make use of a three-country spatial bargaining game of coalition formation, in order to examine the endogenous strategic considerations in the creation and enlargement of international unions. Why would we observe a gradualist approach in the formation of the grand coalition even if the latter is assumed to be weakly efficient? I propose asymmetric information about the benefits of integration as a mechanism that can generate gradual union formation in equilibrium. As it turns out, it may well be in the ‘core’ countries’ interest to delay the accession of a third, ‘peripheral’ country in order to (1) stack the institutional make-up of the initial union in their favor and (2) signal their high resolve to wait out the expansion of their bilateral subunion. A related case from the European experience provides an interesting illustration.     

Appropriating Nature in Crisis-ridden Greece: The Rationale of Capitalist Restructuring,Part 1

The ongoing crisis in Greece constitutes an emblematic case of repressive capitalist restructuring. In this first part of a two-paper series, we argue that public debt is used as a vehicle for furthering the neoliberal transformation of Greek society with serious implications for the appropriation of nature. We present theoretical considerations about nature in capitalism, the rationale of neoliberal capitalist restructuring, as well as the relation between nature and neoliberalism. We finally present the timeline of the Greek crisis, as well as how the three structural adjustment programs wrought a severe capitalist restructuring upon Greece.