Abstract
Over the twentieth century, Greece shifted from monarchy to republic in a sequence that involved civil war, dictatorship, rigged referendums and several constitutional revisions. This experience is used to examine the changing profile of power relations of the post-WWII monarchical and republican constitutions. A pattern of increasing authority, instrumental and positive power relations is observed. Of those, only the former trend is compatible with the definitional propositions of the VOIP.
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Notes
- 1.
The background to the popular revolt was that in July 1843, Greece defaulted on her external debt and was forced to cut public spending. The latter hit particularly hard civil servants and military staff who initiated the uprising of September 1843.
- 2.
Interestingly, opposition to the king had also been preceded by an external default in 1860.
- 3.
The Greek language lacks separate words for “democracy”, the system of government where political decisions are made by the people through a competitive electoral process, and “republic”, the form of state where the head of state is not hereditary, which is also translated as “democracy”.
- 4.
It is thought that even though the actual size of the majority was manipulated, there was sufficient support for Constantine’s return to win in a fair ballot (see Clogg 1986).
- 5.
If no candidate obtains the latter, the required majority is reduced to three-fifths; if that fails, the parliament is dissolved. After the election, a candidate must receive a three-fifths majority of the votes in the new parliament to be elected as president. If that is not achieved, a simple majority is required; failing that, the candidate receiving a plurality of votes is deemed as elected president.
- 6.
These included the Data Protection Authority, the Confidentiality of Communications Authority, the National Council for Radio and Television, the Civil Service Appointments Authority and the Office of the Citizen’s Advocate (Ombudsman).
- 7.
This is by no means certain since preservation of the constitution may simply reflect the rigidity of the procedures for amending it.
- 8.
In addition, significant but implicit constitutional re-writing may take place through judicial review of the constitutionality of laws and administrative acts carried out by the courts (see Voigt 1999). This type of implicit constitutional change for the case of Greece is left for future research.
- 9.
The 1844 monarchical constitution did not provide for amendment, while the revision provisions of the 1864 constitution were considerably stricter requiring large supermajorities and the consent of three successive parliaments.
- 10.
- 11.
See Tridimas (2010) for a detailed political economy analysis of the 1974 referendum.
- 12.
It is ironic that the referendums called before the 1975 Constitution had no constitutional basis, while no referendum has been called after the procedure of holding one was formally incorporated in the 1975 charter. On the contrary, in November 2011, a call by the then PM, G. Papandreou, for a referendum to approve the austerity measures required to tackle the Greek sovereign debt crisis was not only aborted but also led to the resignation of the prime minister.
- 13.
Britain, however, offers the counter-example where an unwritten constitution can be changed by ordinary legislation and yet constitutional crises are rare.
- 14.
- 15.
Eleftheriadis (2005), however, argues that such deficiencies are better tackled by using the criminal law system rather than constitutional amendments, especially if the intended objective is transparency in public administration.
- 16.
Nor can the hypothesis that the proportion of authority relations is the same across the five different constitutions can be rejected as it yields a χ2 ratio of 1.03 with 4 degree of freedom (not shown).
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Tridimas, G. (2015). Constitutional Convulsions in Modern Greece. In: Imbeau, L., Jacob, S. (eds) Behind a Veil of Ignorance?. Studies in Public Choice, vol 32. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14953-0_10
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