While Greece is considered a consolidated South European democracy, in fact one of the earliest cases of the ‘Third Wave of Democratization’ which started in the mid-1970s, the consolidation of Greek democracy has not been equally successful in all institutional sectors (e.g., bureaucracy, citizen-administration relations, justice system, mass media). Moreover, high levels of distrust towards political and administrative institutions persist more than three decades after the 1974 transition to democracy. The quality of Greek democracy has been very uneven, not only when judged on a sector by sector basis, but also across time, as recent violent outbursts have shown (December 2008 riots, May 2010 violent demonstrations). The assessment and measurement of quality of democracy in Greece can be done in comparative perspective, drawing on cross-national attitudinal surveys and assessments of international organizations made by experts who assign numerical values to quality of democracy indicators. However, from a methodological point of view, the need for a complementary qualitative approach emerges as students of quality of democracy realize the limits of an approach based exclusively on such surveys and assessments. From a substantive point of view, the continuing importance of the role of the state in Greek economy and society allows for the possibility to understand Greece not only in the comparative perspective of South European democracies, but also in the context of new post-communist East and South East European democracies with which Greece may share more political, social and cultural similarities than originally thought.
