Greek Views of the 2015 Bailout Agreement: A Matter of Power Asymmetries or Socialisation?

ABSTRACT

In July 2015, after intense negotiations with its creditors, Greece received a bailout in exchange for fiscal restraint. The coalition government at that time, led by the left-wing SYRIZA party, elected on the basis of an anti-austerity platform, eventually accepted the prevalent austerity frames of the creditors. Through the aid of Q-method, an analysis of Greek opinion leaders’ views of the negotiation highlights that this outcome can be explained in two different ways. The first posits that the ideological overtones that ruling SYRIZA injected in its negotiation strategy exhibited a lack of socialisation and undermined Greece’s already weak bargaining position. The second focuses on the institutional status quo bias in the Eurogroup in Germany’s favour, which discourages any change in the Eurozone. These two views may have partly been influenced by questions of political accountability.

KEYWORDS:

• Greece
• bailout agreements
• rational choice institutionalism
• socialisation
• Q-methodology

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank all reviewers for their valuable comments and constructive feedback. In addition, the author would like to thank the participants in this study, who devoted a significant amount of time and provided their experiential insights to this study.

Notes

¹ The ECB initiated the SMP in 2010 at the start of the Eurozone’s debt crisis. It designed it to ease market pressure on the borrowing costs of the Eurozone member states and preceded the central bank’s more ambitious quantitative easing programme (QE) launched in 2015.

² By pushing their maturities away into the future.

³ The Eurogroup is an informal body where the ministers of the Eurozone member states deliberate about matters relating to their shared responsibilities concerning the Euro.

⁴ https://shawnbanasick.github.io/ken-q-analysis/.

⁵ To this end, we manually ‘flagged’ the most representative associated respondents (Q-sorts) scoring in each factor. Through ‘flagging’, we highlighted the Q-sorts to be used for subsequent calculations. We measured the idealised z-score for each statement and for each respective factor. Theoretically, Q-sorts with higher factor loadings should contribute proportionally more to each of the factor estimates than Q-sorts with relatively lower factor loadings. After the completion of the manual ‘flagging’, we extracted the factors that included at least two ‘flagged’ factor loadings.

⁶ Principal components analysis was the default method of factor extraction in the employed software. Through principal component analysis, we extracted two factors: while the software initially produced five factors, only two contained at least two factor loadings as required by Q-methodologists (Brown, 1980), while the other three included one factor loading, meaning one participant. This explains why three respondents out of 21 have not been included in any of the two extracted factors/viewpoints. We also performed a ‘varimax’ rotation of these two factors in order to re-examine the nature of the correlations among our participants.

⁷ Statement from a participant in the study scoring in Viewpoint 1.

⁸ Statement from a participant in the study scoring in Viewpoint 1.

⁹ Statement from a participant in the study scoring in Viewpoint 2.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Vasileios P. Karakasis

Vasileios P. Karakasis is Lecturer in European Studies and Researcher in the Research Group “Changing Role of Europe” at The Hague University of Applied Sciences, The Hague, Netherlands.