Lessons from the Greek Crisis through the Lens of Policy-Entrepreneurs: An Assessment through the Use of Q-Methodology

In August 2018 and after Greece’s bailout program officially ended, the Greek Prime Minister hailed a “new era” for his country, which in his view has re-gained control of its destiny following nearly a decade of austerity measures tied to rescue programs. According to conventional wisdom, crises, like the one that Greek economy and society suffered between 2010-2018, offer clear-cut opportunities to policy-entrepreneurs for learning over what went wrong and how to tackle future crises. In a perfect world, the Greek policy-entrepreneurs would have drawn the “right lessons” and adjusted the institutional crisis-prevention mechanisms accordingly. However, real world politics does not always live up to conventional wisdom. Different and contradictory lessons are often distilled even from identical crisis responses. How do crises affect policy-learning? By taking stock of the rich literature on policy-learning, we ask the following research question: what are the main lessons that Greek policy-entrepreneurs have drawn from the economic crisis? I use Sabatier’s (1988) advocacy coalition framework in order to underscore the role of knowledge, ideas and policy-oriented learning in the process of Greece’s economic policy change (?) after the end of the bail-outs. For the purpose of this exploratory study, a micro-level analysis consisting of face to face interactions with policy-entrepreneurs is deemed necessary. In this vein, I resort to Q methodology, a forum tailor-made to “measure” human subjectivity. As the first phase of Q methodology and in order to create the “universe of verbalizations” about this particular topic, I gather -from relevant academic articles, IMF reports, transcripts of interviews with Eurogroup officials and opinion articles from the Greek and international press- 150 relevant statements about the perceived causes of the crisis, the way it was managed and the prevention policies (to be) established. I reduce this “universe” into a more manageable volume (of 30 statements) through the help of “political discourse analysis”. The stake at this stage is to safeguard the quintessential aspects of this “universe”. At the last stage, I approach policy- entrepreneurs across different political parties and ask them to sort out the 30 statements into some kind of rank order through a physical process, facilitated by the presentation of each statement on its own numbered card. After collecting the sorted answers, I conduct factor-analysis to determine the cluster of positions held by them, by virtue of demonstrating similar thinking to these statements. The emerging clusters of positions eventually uncover the key lessons Greek policy-entrepreneurs have distilled from the crisis and the “ideational” filters they use to distil these lessons.