The Hay Age: Explaining SYRIZA's Re-election in September 2015

A recent article in the Greek Kathimerini daily newspaper described the current political period in Greece as the ‘Hay Age’, referring to what the article perceived as the sheepish behavior of voters who continued to support Syriza. The author’s bafflement stems from the fact that while the Greek economy visibly deteriorated during Syriza’s January to September 2015 term and the party abandoned its central pledge to annul the bailout treaties signed by previous governments, its voters maintained their support in the September elections. The paper aims to utilize data collected and provided by the Prorata poll company prior to the September 20th elections in order to solve the puzzle of Syriza’s surprising resilience. Dominant theories of electoral behavior are not able to explain Syriza’s resilience. First, economic theories of voting seem insufficient, as deteriorating economic indices, bank runs and capital controls should be expected to affect the party negatively, but did not produce a major effect. Theories of programmatic and clientelistic linkages seem similarly inadequate. Syriza’s program was almost wholly abandoned as the result of the new agreement it signed with Greece’s European partners on July 12th, invalidating any expectations of ending austerity. Clientelistic linkages are an unlikely candidate as an explanatory variable too, as the public sector’s intake during its first term and the constraints posed by the new bailout on state hiring meant that expectations of mass partisan hires would be unrealistic. The paper’s main hypothesis is that neither the economy directly nor programmatic consistency were major concerns on the run up to the September elections but instead the decisive voting criterion was attitudes towards party leaders and personal trust in them. There are two reasons for this, the first being the effort by Syriza to focus on the leaders’ credentials. The second is the structure of the policy regime during the bailout years. Effectively, Greek policy has evolved into a two-level policy game, where the Greek government jointly formulates policy with its foreign creditors and their representatives, while at the same time tries to appease its domestic constituency. The direct programmatic channel of accountability between government and electorate has been distorted due to the foreign creditor’s ability to wield effective veto power over several policy fields. As such, if the relationship between government and electorate is placed in a principal-agent framework, the agent’s role has been transformed from designing and implementing policy to extracting as much as possible through negotiations with foreign creditors. The outcome is increased personalization of politics, as complicated and obscure negotiations render trust in the person leading the negotiations and his personality traits as salient topics of political competition. This is confirmed by empirical analysis on poll data, where logistic regression analysis, with vote intention for Syriza as the dependent variable, reveals that the only statistically significant independent variables that predict voting choice are primarily positive assessments of Alexis Tsipras and secondarily evaluations of the government’s negotiation outcomes, while judgements on programmatic consistency are seemingly insignificant.