This edited volume, the fourth in a renowned series exploring “the nature and consequences of democracy in the New Southern Europe,” asks how socioeconomic modernization, democratization, and Europeanization have changed state structures and public policy domains in Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. The editors have compiled seven well-integrated sectoral studies that examine the impact of one or several of these driving forces in most or all Southern European countries, covering public administration, the judicial system, the welfare state, public finances, subnational politics, and environmental awareness.
To establish a common basis for comparison, the introduction elaborates a historical institutionalist argument, claiming that Southern European societies have traditionally been shaped by “heavy” but also weak states. State power was excessively centralized and reinforced by frequent periods of emergency and authoritarian rule that rely on forceful repression. States were dominated by the upper socioeconomic strata, they consisted of overstaffed bureaucracies serving political patronage functions, and they governed national economies through “state corporatism,” including large parastate enterprises, highly regulated industrial relations, and protectionist economic policies. Yet traditional Southern European states also failed to control the military, to provide efficient public administration and inclusive public education, to organize victorious wars, to establish integrative national ideologies and country-wide legitimacy, and to extract sufficient revenues from the upper social strata to overcome the chronic indebtedness of public finances.
In their concluding summary, Richard Gunther and Nikiforos Diamandouros find that “the four authoritarian regimes of Southern Europe were all transformed into standard democratic regimes, while the four Southern European states have evolved along diverging trajectories” (p. 359), so that today there is no longer a single “model” of a Southern European state. Major differences include the more far-reaching decentralization of Italy and Spain, a more professional civil service in Spain, and higher aggregate welfare spending in Italy. The three clusters of explanatory factors—socioeconomic modernization, democratization, and Europeanization—have exerted differential influences, depending on the state subsystem examined.
In accordance with assumptions of modernization theory, Francis G. Castles and Stavros B. Thomadakis show that the volumes of social security spending and public budgets increased with economic development and corresponded to the intraregional variation of earlier and later modernizers. Castles is also able to demonstrate the impact of democratization on social spending by disentangling modernization and democratization effects. Whereas Italy's relatively high level of social security transfers as a share of GDP corresponds to its early transition to democracy, social spending in Portugal and Spain rose only after the democratic transitions in 1974–s75, although both countries had experienced dynamic economic growth in the preceding authoritarian periods. Broader political participation in the wake of a democratic transition induced increases of social expenditure in order to accommodate demands for social protection, as Thomadakis suggests. Such a concern for the legitimacy of the new democratic regime likewise explains why taxes were not raised and the Greek, Spanish, and Portuguese governments incurred significant fiscal deficits.
Gunther and Diamandouros account for the differential impact of democratization on state subsystems by introducing two moderating factors: the degree of subsystem autonomy vis-à-vis the previous authoritarian regime and the strength of entrenched interest groups benefiting from the status quo. Since public administration and the judiciary were decoupled from the authoritarian regimes and professional groups could draw on technocratic legitimacy resources, democratization did not engender fundamental change in these domains (except for the dismantling of special political courts and the creation of constitutional courts outside the mainstream judicial institutions). Organized labor interests succeeded in sustaining rigid labor market regulations and particularist benefit schemes. In contrast, the politicized subsystems of taxation and social expenditure underwent far-reaching reforms after the transition to democracy. The editors' finding about the moderating impact of subsystemic autonomy and entrenched interests is also largely in accord with studies on democratization and state reforms in postsocialist countries. These studies have observed fundamental economic and fiscal reforms intended to establish market economies, on the one hand, and the persisting influence of technocratic elites, on the other.
With respect to Europeanization, Gunther and Diamandorous conclude that membership in the European Community, European Union, and European Monetary Union entailed pressures that have transformed Southern European states by contributing to the liberalization of trade regimes, the privatization and closure of parastatal sectors, the emergence of multilevel governance structures, and the consolidation of public finances. These effects are documented by Thomadakis and by Iván Llamazares and Gary Marks, who analyze regional mobilization and identity in the cases of Catalonia and the Basque Country.
The strength of the book lies in the detailed analysis and reconstruction of these impacts, as well as in its systematic cross-national comparative approach. While the sectoral studies cover important state subsystems, a more detailed account of executive organization is, however, missing. This is particularly unfortunate as such a study could provide an important (and hitherto missing) link in the explanatory chain from new democratic politics to state policies. Thus, the reader is left with occasional references to the distinction between majoritarian and consensus democracy (pp. 3, 360), a more centripetal political competition (pp. 33–34) or cross-national differences in cabinet stability (p. 229).
Dimitri A. Sotiropoulos paves the way to such an analysis of governmental arrangements and governing patterns by comparing Southern European bureaucracies and the administrative reforms initiated by the new democratic governments. His commendable analysis indicates the emergence of forms of prime ministerial government in Greece, ministerial or party government in Italy, and bureaucratic government in Spain. But since his focus is more on the civil service, this organizational variety is not further explored.
Scholars of executive organization and executive–legislative relations would also question the conceptual distinction that Gunther and Diamandouros make between “standard democratic regimes”/“one model of democracy,” on the one hand, and different “types of states,” on the other (p. 359). Over the decade-long time span chosen by the editors to analyze the impact of democratization on the state, the moderating effects of different state types or models of government cannot be simply ignored. Their book is somewhat unclear about how state–society and societal power relations translate into constitutional choices of executive organization at the time of the political transition and how these conditions then facilitate distinctive patterns of government that could influence the various domains of public policy.
A reconstruction of these linkages would be particularly interesting for the debate on democratization and state reform in Central and Eastern Europe. Studies of postsocialist democratization have, for example, found that frequent changes of government (i.e., more competitive patterns of government) have been crucial for successful reforms in East-Central European countries because they have strengthened the democratic accountability of incumbents, facilitated the renewal of failed policies, and prevented state capture by beneficiaries of initial liberalizing reforms. These arguments challenge the conventional position according to which political stability and unconstrained executive authority are necessary for the effective implementation of reforms. That the present volumes does not relate to this debate might perhaps hint at another important divergence of modern Southern European states, namely, in their patterns of government.
