Most of the world’s democratic governments are party government. Political parties control the decision-making process – although often they are not the only ones to do so – and, in a high-quality democracy, parties’ executive control is subjected to a golden rule: the existence of a governed-governors relationship based on electoral accountability.
With the onset of the economic crisis, the Southern European’s political systems – but not just them – have experienced some changes. In particular, “party (or parties) governments” and “accountable governments” – two important pillars of the democratic politics – appear under pressure. And someone could say that they are breaking down.
This paper aims to provide an assessment of some essential conditions of government electoral accountability. The analysis encompasses four Southern European democracies: Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain. To contextualize the political impact of economic crisis, each country is examined for a period of thirty years: from the Eighties to the 2013.
Assuming that patterns in party government are crucial for the effective work of electoral accountability, the paper focuses on three dimensions: “government identifiability”, “parliament fragmentation”, and “identifiability of alternatives in government”.
