EDA on Greek Parliament

Introduction

This is the first analysis article on my website! I decided to go through the entire data analysis cycle, starting with data extraction, moving on to cleaning, and concluding with the analysis. In this article, I’d like to explore the history of the members of the Hellenic Parliament and answer some interesting questions. To conduct this research, I am using data published on the Hellenic Parliament’s website regarding elected members of parliament.

The Greek political scene has dominated public discourse in recent years, unfortunately for negative reasons, due to the recent economic crisis. A significant part of the dialogue concerns the causes of the crisis, which remain a subject of debate to this day. In this article, I will address only one point of criticism: that “we have the same” representatives. Of course, our representatives in Parliament were not appointed by any party (rather, elections were held), so the criticism centers on the idea that the same parties or even the same members of Parliament are elected, perhaps for personal gain. So, what actually happened? Is this a valid claim? That is what I will examine in this article.

Data

The dataset was extracted from the Hellenic Parliament’s website using the {RSelenium} package. It is freely available on GitHub and covers all legislative terms from 1974 through 2019. Each row corresponds to a member of parliament elected to a single term, with five variables: full name, parliamentary group, electoral district, parliamentary term, and term duration. In a later version of my dataset, I decided to also analyze data on gender inequalities, which is why an additional gender variable has been added. This variable is a gender estimate based exclusively on the lawmaker’s name; therefore, it involves some uncertainty.

Table 1: Cleaned dataset (sample)

MP	Party	Constituency	Term	Dates	Gender
Agapidaki E.	ND	Epikrateias	19	(28/05/2023 - 29/05/2023)	female
Skylakakis Th.	ND	Epikrateias	19	(28/05/2023 - 29/05/2023)	male
Stylianidis Ch.	ND	Epikrateias	19	(28/05/2023 - 29/05/2023)	male
Lytrivi I.	ND	Epikrateias	19	(28/05/2023 - 29/05/2023)	female
Stamatis G.	ND	Epikrateias	19	(28/05/2023 - 29/05/2023)	male
Chatziioannidou M.	ND	Epikrateias	19	(28/05/2023 - 29/05/2023)	female
Polyzou M.	ND	Epikrateias	19	(28/05/2023 - 29/05/2023)	female
Iliopoulos O.	SYRIZA	Epikrateias	19	(28/05/2023 - 29/05/2023)	male
Akrita E.	SYRIZA	Epikrateias	19	(28/05/2023 - 29/05/2023)	female
Apostolakis E.	SYRIZA	Epikrateias	19	(28/05/2023 - 29/05/2023)	male

The following table summarizes the parties appearing in the dataset, along with their abbreviations and the colors used in the graphs.

Table 2: Party names and their abbreviations

Party name	Abbreviation	Colour
New Democracy	ND	#0492c2
Coalition of the Radical Left	SYRIZA	#e27bb1
Panhellenic Socialist Movement	PASOK	#95bb72
Communist Party of Greece	KKE	#FF6666
Independent	Independent	#808080
Greek Solution	Lysi	#808080
European Realistic Disobedience Front	MeRA25	#808080
Golden Dawn	GD	#808080
The River	River	#5592aa
Popular Unity	LaE	#808080
Independent Greeks	ANEL	#808080
Democratic Left	DIMAR	#FF4466
Independent Democratic MPs	ADP	#808080
Popular Orthodox Rally	LAOS	#808080
Democratic Social Movement	DIKKI	#808080
Political Spring	POLAN	#808080
Alternative Ecologists	AE	#808080
Democratic Renewal	DIANA	orange
Communist Party of Greece (interior)	KKE int.	#FF3366
Union of the Democratic Centre	EDIK	#808080
National Alignment	EP	#808080
Progress and Left Forces Alliance	SPAD	#808080
Party of New Liberals	KNF	#808080
United Democratic Left	EDA	#808080

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

One fundamental criticism of the political system is that the same people are constantly being elected. Of course, this criticism cannot be directed solely at politicians, but also at the segment of the citizenry that chooses to support them. You cannot expect to see change in the political system if power simply alternates between two or three parties, let alone when you insist on the same representatives. In this section, I attempt to identify which members of parliament have been elected the most times, regardless of party.

Filtering for members with 11 or more terms in office, this group comprises 20 members of parliament. Given that there are a total of 19 legislative terms from which we are analyzing the number of terms served, the results may be disappointing. If we take into account the threshold of 9 terms in office, 73 members of parliament fall into this category. In fact, the graph below reveals something that might be expected: most of them belong to the historically major parties (New Democracy and PASOK), with only three members of parliament on this list belonging to other parties.

Party-level Electability

So far, we have looked at the members of parliament since 1974 who have been elected the most times. It would be useful to examine this same characteristic for each party separately. First, it is interesting to see at the party level whether the number of terms is high and whether there is a significant difference between the most frequently elected members, which may be due to their popularity, and those further down the list. A second objective is that the previous section did not identify many figures from other historical parties, so we have no idea about their election patterns. Consequently, for this section, in addition to New Democracy and PASOK, I will include the KKE and SYRIZA. Obviously, there are other parties in the history of the Hellenic Parliament, but the data on them is sparse since they do not have as long a history as the KKE, New Democracy, PASOK, and SYRIZA, resulting in few terms in the Hellenic Parliament; thus, it makes no sense to discuss electability or a fixation on specific individuals.

KKE

The Communist Party of Greece was founded in November 1918. Under the Metaxas dictatorship, the KKE was outlawed, and many of its members were imprisoned or exiled. During the German occupation (1941–1944), it participated in the resistance by founding the EAM and ELAS. After liberation, a major conflict arose that culminated in the civil war (1946–1949). The KKE remained outlawed for many years, until it was legalized by Karamanlis in 1974. It is the only communist party with a continuous presence in the Hellenic Parliament since 1974.

ND

New Democracy was founded in October 1974 by Konstantinos Karamanlis. Its political orientation is generally described as right-wing or center-right. It alternated in power with PASOK for decades, consistently forming one (right-wing) pole of the Greek two-party system. Since 2019, it has been in power with Kyriakos Mitsotakis as prime minister.

PASOK

The Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) was founded in 1974 by Andreas Papandreou. In 1981, it won the elections by a landslide. It was the party that would implement what were perhaps the most significant and modernizing policies for the country. It has often been criticized for its economic policies and high spending, to the point where memes about the PASOK era of the 1980s are now circulating online. The economic crisis of 2010 took a heavy toll on the party: its support plummeted from 43.9% (2009) to 4.7% (January 2015).

SYRIZA

The Coalition of the Left and Progress was founded in 1989. Until 2012, it remained a minor parliamentary force, with vote shares that rarely exceeded 5%. Its rise coincided with the economic crisis: from 4.6% (2009) to 36.3% (January 2015), winning the elections. In essence, it brought an end to the two-party system that had existed since 1981. The main reason for the party’s rise was the country’s poor economic situation; until 2015, the country had been governed exclusively by either PASOK or New Democracy. Under Alexis Tsipras, the party governed in coalition with ANEL and, despite its anti-austerity rhetoric, ultimately signed a third Memorandum.

Two-party Dominance in Greece

The focus on individuals and political parties is evident. An interesting indicator is the degree of two-party dominance, that is, the combined share of seats held by the two largest parties. The graph below shows extremely high rates of two-party dominance. During the years of the crisis, the combined share fell significantly, from about 80% to ~60%. To play devil’s advocate, it’s worth noting that over the years, the leading party receives a bonus in the number of seats it wins; therefore, the proportion of seats does not reflect the actual, or even proportional, preferences of the electorate. Consequently, while this indicator shows the practical strength of the two-party system in Parliament, it does not reflect how much the electorate actually wants it. The significant distortion of the electoral will through the seat bonus could constitute a justified complaint by the electorate. How could political change, even gradual change, take place if the leading party is favored to such an extent?

Female Representation

A key sign of a healthy parliament is how well it represents the people it serves. In the past, Greece has not done well in this area, with women not being fairly represented. In the first ten parliamentary terms, women were less than 10% of the total. Things have improved recently, but there is still a lot of work to do. In the last elections, for example, women won only 20–25% of the seats. This means that about one in four people in parliament is a woman, even though women make up about half of all voters. It is worth noting that women in Greece gained the right to vote in 1952, which may have contributed to our slow progress in combating stereotypes about whether men and women are equally capable of holding this position.

The analysis below looks at the percentage of female MPs for each party. The data show that New Democracy (ND), the more conservative party, has consistently had very few women among its MPs. The left-wing parties present a very different picture.

Parliamentary Renewal

We observe that a few parties are in charge of the Greek political scene. The new parties that appeared during the crisis mostly didn’t last very long. This raises a logical question: Do citizens vote for new candidates? How many members of parliament are elected for the first time during each new parliamentary term?

The graph below compares each legislative term (from the 2nd to the 19th) with all previous ones. This helps us determine how many members of parliament were new. The results show that people prefer to keep familiar faces. But there are times when this trend is reversed, especially during the 5th term in 1989. Finally, we see that the public wants new faces during election cycles after our country’s debt crisis. There has been an increased demand for new faces since 2012 (14th term).

Cumulative MP Count

I’ll wrap things up with a summary of the election results. PASOK and New Democracy are the two main parties in the Hellenic Parliament. Together, they have more than three-quarters of all the members of Parliament in the Parliament’s history. When you add the KKE and SYRIZA parties, they have just over 90% of all members.

Finally, the total number of women in the Greek Parliament. The results are not encouraging: female members of Parliament account for just ~12.1% of all elected members.

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