Bureaucracy and political parties: An unbalanced relationship

Δεν διατίθεται περίληψη στα ελληνικάThere is a disparity in organizational strength between political parties and the state in Greece after the transition to democracy, i.e., from 1974 until the present. Political parties are stronger than the state apparatus on a number of dimensions. The strength of the state is defined in terms of the organizational resources on which political parties and the state can draw. Such resources are the constitutional set-up of the post-authoritarian Greek regime, in terms of the room for reform granted to incoming governments, the legitimacy enjoyed by parties, the technical expertise available to them, and the internal cohesion that party mechanisms have forged under the guidance of contemporary Greek party leaders.The weakness of the Greek state, evident in the number of administrative reforms, to which it has been subjected in the short post-authoritarian period and in the inroads that successive governing parties have made into the administrative personnel and the malleable bureaucratic structures, can be accounted for by a historical-sociological analysis of party-state relations in Greece since the early nineteenth century. This analysis shows that parties had penetrated the state from its inception, that the governing elites of the previous century were oriented more towards irredentist projects than modernization efforts, that authoritarian regimes in this century de-legitimized the Greek public administration, and that the long periods of majoritarian single party rule over the state stripped the state from any autonomous development of human resources and adequate bureaucratic structures