The Eurozone Crisis and Austerity Politics: A Trigger for Administrative Reform in Greece?

Greece was the first European Monetary Union country to sign a Memorandum with the European Commission and the European Central Bank in order to secure financial assistance and prevent a total collapse of its economy following the severe international economic crisis. This Memorandum (2010), offered detailed steps of structural reforms that have affected all public services in Greece. The lack of major results and the stickiness of the ‘Greek problem’ have made Greece a unique case-study for evaluating both the recipe of the international donors and the domestic capacity for reform. A historical institutionalist approach and the concept of ‘policy paradigm’ are combined in order to evaluate what are the conditions for a major administrative reform in time of crisis. The article focuses on the specific attempt to reform public administration during the Papandreou government in order to analyse the importance of both time and type of change in the success of a major reform programme.