Since its initial bailout by the EU, IMF and the European Central Bank, Greece has struggled to implement its austerity measures. Declining levels of public trust are a key reason for this 

Since 2009, the Greek government has been accused on many occasions by its international creditors of intensifying the public debt crisis, due to its reluctance and inability to implement measures agreed upon through the international bailout agreements. The Greek government has often given the response that targets have been missed due to the higher than anticipated extent of the economic recession. We disagree with both sides of this argument.

Political trust underpins the government’s poor implementation track record, Lower levels of trust decrease administrative capacity and make problems even more intractable – creating a vicious cycle of non-cooperation and economic recession.

Although many measures included in the first and second bailout packages were demanded by non-Greek actors - and certain variables, such as economic growth, partly depended on the global economic environment - the Greek government undertook the sovereign responsibility to faithfully execute the provisions in the agreement. Our focus on the domestic dimensions of implementation is not because we discount the importance of external factors, but because we want to analyse the domestic components of implementation.

At the same time, there are a number of alternative explanations about the failure of the implementation process. Poor leadership, bad design of policy strategies, social resistance and internal party and government politics play a role in the outcome of the process; however, political trust is the variable that underpins all the other factors.

In other words, everything starts from trust in the political ability of the government to track down problems and provide viable solutions that improve the welfare of stakeholders. Trust defines and affects the way government strategy is disseminated to social groups and other stakeholders (minimising social resistance) and to political partners (diminishing internal and external political opposition). Clarity, duration and commitment are the building blocks of trust that link the various implementation components together.

Implementation is a negotiation game between the government, state agencies, and citizens. In times of austerity, these negotiations become asymmetric between those three parties because information and compliance is imposed from the top. When the pie shrinks in a recession, we can view society as a zero-sum game between conflicting groups. Policy-making becomes adversarial and implementation breaks down because parties find little reason to cooperate.

Political trust facilitates cooperation, making implementation success more likely. Political mistrust weakens the effects of
policy-making between actors and underpins the protests, accelerating the downward spiral of implementation failure.

Eurobarometer data for Greece shows an overall decline of trust in political institutions, be they executive, legislative or judiciary. It is interesting to observe that political trust diminishes altogether in Greece for government and is (practically) non-existent for political parties at the height of the crisis in 2010. As for the courts, the exposed failure to implement the law or hold political figures accountable and responsible for the country’s predicament may be the reason behind the drop in trust.

In Greece, contrary to our expectations, and despite the constant negotiations between social groups and the government, levels of trust seem to decrease as political agents are captured by the social and professional cliques, and government actors keep changing the rules of the game.

At the same time there has been a climate of suspicion between social groups and the government leading to the repudiation of the political system and effectively to further non-compliance and implementation failure - as well as a spiral of cynicism and disillusionment as the state struggled to regain the trust of its citizens.

Certainly the enormity of proposed changes in the case of Greece have elevated the difficulty of implementation. And the unwillingness or inability of government to frame the issues in ways that generate trust has lessened its ability to convince target populations that reforms would pay off. Success in implementation depends largely (though not exclusively) on the ability of politicians to generate trust by living up to the political consequences of their actions. Our research show that even in times of extreme austerity, the norms of protecting ‘special’ or electorally pivotal social and professional groups persisted and were well-embedded into the political system.

At the height of the crisis in Greece, the government failed repeatedly to fulfill its promises, become an honest broker among negotiating parties, and synthesise different points of view to promote the common interest. Moreover, there was a long-term structural relationship between political corruption
and implementation, which involved the absence of a sense of obligation towards the state and the common good.

Trust cannot be increased by simply doing away with dishonest leaders or bureaucracies and replacing them with a new set of people. Only a change of cultural paradigms that
embed notions of trust within the implementation processes can do so. Otherwise even if society becomes less corrupt it does not necessarily mean that it will become more trusting. Undoubtedly, this is not a short-term policy implication but one that involves enduring commitments and efforts that are
difficult in periods of austerity and social crisis.

What is the state of play in Greece now? After a long time, during which the political leadership often accused the European partners of inertia, international trust has returned to Greece.

At the beginning of December, the Eurogroup released the next bailout tranche evaluating the Greek austerity programme positively. Shortly after, Standard and Poor’s provided the country with a vote of confidence upgrading the credit rating of Greece from junk to B-/B, and the European Central Bank started to accept Greek bonds as collateral, leading to a sharp drop in interest rate yields to a low of two years.

But  international trust is only one part of the equation, and as long as the Greek government cannot turn the climate of political trust around in the domestic realm, the structural rigidities of the past will continue to dominate the public policy-making process and delay the success of implementation
and change in Greece.

Theofanis Exadaktylos is lecturer in European politics in the school of politics at the University of Surrey. His co-author is Nikos Zahariadis,  professor and director of international studies at the department of government at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. The original version of this post appeared on the EUROPP website, and is based on the GreeSE Working Paper: Policy implementation and political trust: Greece in the age of austerity.