The Politics of Elite Transformation: The Consolidation of Greek Democracy in Comparative Perspective, and: Parties, Politics, and Democracy in the New Southern Europe, and: The Social Psychology of Party Behaviour (review)

Consider the following picture. A country is divided into bitter rival factions, each faction seeking an outside protector to help it overcome its rival at all cost. The country's general weakness caused by the paucity of resources and poor economic health is further exacerbated by deep divisions among elites and alienation between elites and their constituents. Division and alienation beget authoritarianism, leaving the country in a perennial state of shock. Fast forward one hundred years, and the situation is reversed. The country has a stable and robust democracy. The economy is in full throttle, and the bitter rivalry is a distant memory. Voter alienation is gone, and a general consensus has developed on the direction the country should take. To be sure, many problems remain unresolved; alienation has been replaced by apathy, and economic vitality is still a relative concept. But the distance traveled is impressive.

How do countries make this journey? How did Greece make the transition from authoritarianism to democracy and what factors account for the consolidation and persistence of democracy? Addressing these questions yields valuable insight not only into the country's past, but also into Greece's future. The factors that helped overcome the formidable obstacles in the transition to democracy are sources of power that may also address current problems and brighten future prospects.

Each of the three books reviewed here addresses a different piece of the puzzle, but collectively they provide a fairly complete picture of the consolidation and persistence of democracy in Greece. Karakatsanis maintains that the main factor leading to the consolidation of democracy in Greece was elite convergence brought about by strong personalities, partisan strategies, and the passage of time. Diamandouros and Gunther point to the significance of stable electoral systems and the institutionalization of the rules of the game to account for democratic persistence. Zeroing in on a remarkable, but short-lived, period of unity, Triandafyllidou argues that position (majority or minority) and identity shape partisan behavior and strategy. Taken together all three authors point to the same conclusion: Greece has become a normal European democracy in a relatively short period of time. The question is: how was the feat accomplished, and what does it tell us about Greece's future?

Karakatsanis addresses the question of transition and consolidation. Rejecting the model of elite settlement as inadequate, she turns attention to another model of democratic consolidation, elite convergence. She convincingly argues that elites did not settle or negotiate the transition to democracy in a way that was done in Spain, for example. Rather elite preferences converged over time on the need for a peaceful transition through several mechanisms. The most prominent among them was the role of personalities. Greek politics has traditionally attached great significance to personalities. One of the reasons for the national schism in the early part of the 20th century was the personal dislike and mistrust between Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos and King Constantine. Many of the "irreconcilable" differences that separated the authoritarian right from the moderate center can be traced back to the personalities of the founders of the respective parties, Constantine Karamanlis and George Papandreou. Some of the problems with the right's brief tenure in power in the early 1990s and the left's strategy of polarization can be easily accounted for by the personal antipathy between the leaders of the two parties, Constantine Mitsotakis and Andreas Papandreou. It is not surprising, therefore, to...