Executive Leadership and the Economic Crisis Management in Greece (2010-2018)

When and how can crises overcome the fragmentation of a core executive and facilitate a centralised management response? Using Greece’s three bailout programmes (2010-18) as case studies, the paper draws on several literatures that refer to crisis centralisation and develop hypotheses that comprise likely contributing factors. It explores these hypotheses by reference to the Crisis Response Networks (CRNs) that successive Greek Prime Ministers utilised in order to deal with the country’s creditors, but also oversee the implementation of bailout conditionality at home. Based on an extensive range of elite interviews, including all four Prime Ministers who led Greece during the crisis, the paper traces the interplay between PM agency and key players within the Core Executive and the CRN during different stages of the crisis and assesses the extent to which the ‘bailout years’ challenged the underlying modus operandi at the heart of the Greek government.