EDA on Greek Parliament

Introduction

This is the first analysis article on my website! I decided to implement the full data analysis cycle — starting from data extraction, moving through tidying, and ending with the analysis itself. In this piece I explore the history of representatives in the Hellenic Parliament and answer some interesting questions. I use data published by the Hellenic Parliament website regarding elected members of parliament.

The Greek political landscape has dominated public discourse in recent years, unfortunately for negative reasons, due to the recent economic crisis. A significant part of this dialogue concerns the causes of the crisis, which remain a point of contention to this day. In this article I focus on just one aspect of the criticism: that “we always have the same” representatives. Of course, our representatives in Parliament were not appointed by any party — elections were held — so the criticism centres on the idea that the same parties or even the same individual MPs keep getting elected, perhaps out of personal loyalty or benefit. So what actually happened? Is this claim justified? That is what I intend to study here. I also examine the tendency to favour familiar faces within the same party, and it is equally interesting to investigate this at the constituency level.

Data

The dataset was scraped from the Hellenic Parliament’s electronic archive using the {RSelenium} package. It is freely available on GitHub and covers all terms from 1974 through 2019. Each row is one MP elected to one term, with five variables: full name, party affiliation, constituency, parliamentary term, and estimated gender.

Number of Parties

I begin with a historical overview of the number of parties represented in the Hellenic Parliament that completed a full term as a parliamentary group. After the fall of the junta, the parties in Parliament were quite few — the historic ones: KKE, New Democracy, and PASOK. The Parliament of 1981 consisted of only three parties.

As the conditions of the post-junta transition matured, room opened for other voices to be heard, which crystallised into new parties. After the 1981–1985 term, new forces began appearing in Parliament with small shares. The most significant in terms of seat count was Synaspismos (the precursor to SYRIZA), which maintained a long parliamentary presence, albeit with small and precarious representation.

In broad terms, the post-junta period can be divided into three stages. The first (1974–1981) was a transitional period during which the party landscape was still taking shape. The second (1981–2009) is characterised by relative stability, with between three and five parliamentary groups in each term. The final period (2009 to the present) begins alongside the first signs of the sovereign debt crisis, when public frustration with the political system expressed itself in a sharp increase in the number of parliamentary groups.

The full extent of this destabilisation is evident in the composition of the 15th term Parliament, where the number of parliamentary groups reached its highest level in the post-junta era.

And finally, the complete overhaul of the political landscape — with a party that had once struggled to enter Parliament at all ending up winning the most seats.

All of this is neatly summarised in the time series below, which counts the number of distinct parliamentary groups per term. The three stages come through clearly.

Electability

A common criticism of the political system is that the same people keep getting elected. That criticism, however, cannot be directed solely at politicians; it also applies to the portion of the electorate that keeps voting for them. You cannot expect to see change in the political system if you alternate power between two or three parties, let alone when you persist in re-electing the same individuals. So what actually happened in Greece? In this section I identify the MPs who have been elected the most times.

Filtering for MPs with 11 or more terms, we find that 8 MPs belong to this group. All of them come from the two major parties, New Democracy and PASOK, with Kaklamanis and Papandreou being the most frequently re-elected PASOK members. To find MPs from other parties we have to lower the bar considerably, to 9 or 10 terms: Papariga was elected 10 times with KKE and Dragasakis 9 times with SYRIZA.

Party-level Electability

It would be particularly useful to study this same characteristic within each party separately. This comparison has some limitations, since some parties either had limited parliamentary representation or did not last long enough to accumulate many terms. For that reason I analyse only the most historically significant parties: KKE, ND, PASOK, and SYRIZA.

KKE

The Communist Party of Greece was founded in November 1918 as the Socialist Labour Movement of Greece (SEKE), in the wake of the October Revolution. Under the dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas, the KKE was banned and many of its members were imprisoned or exiled. During the German occupation (1941–1944) it participated in the resistance by founding the National Liberation Front (EAM). After liberation, a major conflict culminated in the Civil War (1946–1949), which the KKE lost. It remained outlawed until 1974, when it was legalised by Konstantinos Karamanlis.

ND

New Democracy was founded in October 1974 by Konstantinos Karamanlis, immediately after the fall of the dictatorship. It is considered the political successor of the National Radical Union (ERE) and is positioned in the centre-right. After alternating in office with PASOK for decades, forming one stable pole of the Greek two-party system, it has governed since 2019 under Kyriakos Mitsotakis.

PASOK

The Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) was founded on 3 September 1974 by Andreas Papandreou. In 1981 it won the elections with a sweeping majority, opening a long period of dominance. During the 1980s it carried out significant social reforms but faced criticism for expanding the public sector and accumulating debt. The 2010 economic crisis deeply scarred the party: from 43.9% in 2009 to 4.7% in January 2015.

SYRIZA

The Coalition of the Left and Progress was founded in 1989. Until 2012 it remained a small parliamentary force with vote shares rarely exceeding 5%. Its explosive rise coincided with the economic crisis: from 4.6% in 2009 to 36.3% in January 2015, winning the election. Under Alexis Tsipras, it governed in coalition with Independent Greeks (ANEL) and, despite its anti-austerity rhetoric, ultimately signed a third Memorandum.

Two-party Dominance in Greece

The persistent loyalty to both parties and to the same individuals is clear. The chart below tracks the combined seat share of the two largest parties per term. The extraordinarily high two-party seat shares are evident; during the crisis years the combined share fell significantly, from around 80% to roughly 60%. Putting these findings together with the earlier section, it appears that there was a popular reaction that began with the economic crisis — which, while it did not fundamentally transform the party system, did break the duopoly and spread voter discontent across a range of smaller parties.

Female Representation

An important indicator of a parliament’s health is how representative it is. One of the most obvious indicators is the degree to which society accepts women as equally capable representatives. Historically, Greece has performed poorly in this area. Through the first ten terms of the Hellenic Parliament, women represented less than 10% of total MPs. In recent years the situation has improved, though equal representation has not been achieved. It is worth noting that women in Greece obtained the right to vote in 1952. We have now completed 70 years since women could both vote and stand for election, and female representation still stands at around one quarter of parliamentary seats.

Of course, placing all the blame on society is somewhat unfair, given that the parties themselves select their candidates and promote certain individuals more heavily. The analysis below examines the male-to-female ratio among elected MPs per party. The data show that New Democracy, as the more conservative party, has consistently had very low female representation. On the other side of the spectrum, left-wing parties show a markedly different picture, with a stable and significantly higher share of women.

Parliamentary Renewal

We observe that a small number of parties dominate the Greek political landscape. The new parties that emerged during the crisis were mostly short-lived, and what we saw was essentially a reshuffling of voters among the historic parties rather than a genuine realignment. This raises a logical question: do voters at least push for fresh faces as their representatives? To what extent does each new parliamentary term consist of MPs who have never been elected before?

The chart below compares each term (from 2nd to 17th) against all previous terms to see how many MPs were first-timers. The results reveal strong tendencies toward the retention of familiar faces, with only two elections having produced significant renewal where roughly half the members were first-timers.

Cumulative MP Count

I close with a cumulative overview of the electoral results. PASOK and New Democracy are the parties whose combined representation exceeded three quarters of all MPs in the history of Parliament. Adding KKE and SYRIZA, the combined share of all four approaches 90%. All others are independents or members of smaller parties, which underscores just how far we are from a logic of political change.

Finally, the cumulative share of women in the Hellenic Parliament. The results are not encouraging: female MPs account for just ~12.8% of all elected members. In absolute terms, this corresponds to approximately 576 women compared to 3,927 male colleagues.

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