Crisis and extremism. How does an extreme far right emerge in a modern democracy? Evidence from Greece’s Golden Dawn

ABSTRACT

We trace the rise of Golden Dawn, one of the most extreme and violent European far-right parties, from the fringe to a prominent position in Greek politics. We use regression analysis to show that its rise is associated with changes in voting behavior caused by the deep socioeconomic crisis the country went through after 2008. We show that the demand factors affecting the GD vote were triggered by structural changes in the supply side and the implosion of the two-party system that followed the signing of the bail-out agreement (Memorandum) with the country’s creditors. Our results have implications about the political manifestation of socioeconomic grievances and their effect on the far-right vote: whereas socioeconomic grievances usually contribute towards a latent dissatisfaction by the electorate, this might need a sudden supply-side trigger in order to manifest itself, giving little warning signs in advance.

Acknowledgement

With the usual disclaimer, the authors wish to thank participants of a seminar at LSE for useful comments and suggestions on a previous version of the paper. They are indebted to Lamprini Rori for comments and suggestions in different drafts of this paper. Data collection and assistance by George Kilaiditis is gratefully acknowledged. Dimitrios Varakis is acknowledged with thanks. The authors are indebted to MRB Hellas for allowing access to their 2011–2014 TASEIS polls and to three anonymous referees for two rounds of substantial and constructive comments. All authors are from the Athens University of Economics and Business. They can be reached at [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected] respectively.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Technically, a recession began in late 2008, however the severity of the crisis was felt after the European and National elections in June and October 2009. For example, unemployment remained under 10% till 2010 but eventually reached almost 30% in 2013; for a description of the situation in Greece see OECD (2016); on the origins of the crisis and a critical assessment of policy responses, see Christodoulakis (2015).

2 Appendix A1 provides a detailed description of all our variables. The polls use face-to-face interviews and secret ballots and are designed to be representative with respect to demographics. To evaluate representativeness, we regressed intended vote on subsequent election actual vote shares across all regions and dates with at least 80 intended-vote samples. With an estimated intercept of −0.3 (se = 2.32) and slope of 0.90 (se = 0.35) the null of representativeness (constant = 0, slope = 1) is very far from being rejected.

3 Our findings remain qualitatively unchanged when we restrict our sample to only 2009 and 2012.

4 We have not been able to obtain reliable immigration, crime and financial distress data for 2015. For the January 2015 elections, we have used end of 2014 data, obtained from sources listed in the Appendix.

5 Our key conclusions are robust to various transformations of the regressors, including quadratic terms, first differences etc.

6 The persistence of local political tradition is well documented: for example, Voigtlander, Voth, and Voth (2012) show that five-century-old anti-Semitic pogroms can explain the 1933 vote for the German Nazi Party.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Costas Roumanias

Costas Roumanias is Assistant Professor at the Department of International and European Economic Studies of Athens University of Economics and Business. His research interests include formal games and empirical models of voting, spatial econometrics, political extremism, political violence and behavioral economics.

Spyros Skouras

Spyros Skouras is Professor at the Department of International and European Economic Studies of Athens University of Economics and Business. His research interests include empirical political science, finance and econometrics. His recent work has appeared in Public Choice, Journal of Econometrics and Journal of Financial Economics

Nicos Christodoulakis

Nicos Christodoulakis, 68, is Professor of Economic Analysis at the Athens University of Economics & Business. Visiting Professor at the Hellenic Observatory in the European Institute, LSE (2018-2019). Author of several academic papers on macroeconomics, business cycles, and economic growth. His last book is on “Rebooting the Greek Economy” (Dianeosis, 2018, Athens).