Beblavý, Μ. (2015) “Will this time be different for Greece? How to assess its ability to deliver on the reform agenda“, Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) Commentary, 13 March.
Τhis commentary was inspired by the ongoing debate on whether this time will be different for Greece and whether Syriza will deliver on its reform promises to the European partners. It is striking thatthe public debate on such an important issue as well as internal discussions among senior policy-makers frequently resort to ‘gut feelings’ or simple stereotypes.
We present a simple analytical framework that can be used to assess the likelihood that a government will deliver on its reform agenda. Its purpose is not to allow for a precise probabilistic calculation, but to enable better structuring of the knowledge we have. It emphasises that the change depends NOT only on the capacity of the state to design and deliver policies, but even more crucially on state autonomy from both illegitimate and legitimate interests and cognitive models used by policy-makers to make sense of the world.
A quick and dirty assessment of the SYRIZA government using this framework provides limited grounds for optimism, but also cautions that until we have a better understanding of how key figures in the new Greek government see the world, any predictions will be highly speculative.
First of all, governments need the capacity to do things. State capacity can be captured by an answer to a simple question: If a government decides to make something happen, can it make it happen? More rigorously, “state capacity is defined as the ability of the state to dominate, i.e. to coax compliant behaviour from the individuals of a given territory” (Ottervik, 2013).
Relevant posts:
- Tsekeris, C. (2015) “Greece requires political reform as much as structural reform of its economy“, LSE EUROPP, 07 April.
- European Commission (2014) “Market Reforms at Work in Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece“, European Economy 5|2014, Economic and Financial Affairs, September.
- Featherstone, K., (2014), “The political challenges of institutional reform in Greece”, Policy Network, 11 February.