Social Movements’ Impact on the Greek Economy During the Financial Crisis

This paper examines how social movements influenced Greece’s macroeconomic adjustment during the financial crisis and austerity period (2010–2015). The purpose is to identify the channels through which mobilizations—anti-austerity protests, general strikes, youth actions, and solidarity networks—interacted with the economy. The main hypothesis is that social protest operates as an economic force via three mechanisms: expectations (shifts in household and firm beliefs affecting consumption, confidence, and investment), disruption (coordination and operating costs from strikes and stoppages affecting output and employment), and institutional feedback (policy sequencing and credibility under EU–IMF conditionality shaping behavior). Using a theoretical, literature-based methodology—a structured narrative review of peer-reviewed studies, policy documents, and historical syntheses—we map these mechanisms onto outcomes (GDP, unemployment, investment, consumer confidence). The findings support the hypothesis: expectations and feedback dominate the transmission to investment and confidence, while repeated disruption is most salient for labor-market dynamics; solidarity infrastructures cushion social costs but have ambiguous aggregate effects. The scope is interpretive and Greece-specific, yielding testable propositions for future causal work. Limitations follow from the design: the study does not estimate effect sizes or establish causality; conclusions are analytically persuasive rather than statistically demonstrative. The contribution is a mechanism map that integrates social-movement theory with crisis political economy and clarifies where empirical identification should focus.