Political economy perspectives of the fall of the Greek monarchy

The paper uses political economy perspectives to explore the abolition of monarchy in modern Greece. First it presents the oscillating fortunes of the Greek monarchy in the period 1832 – 1974. Noting that strictly speaking none of the standard explanations of the overthrow of the monarchy, war defeat, dissolution of the state, decolonization and revolution, applies to modern Greece, it embarks on an examination of proximate and ultimate causes of the fall of monarchy. In this connection, it analyses the legitimacy of the Greek monarchy, the erosion of its institutional credibility as a result of failures of the crown to abide by the constitutional rules it had promised to respect, and its rejection by the voters in the 1974 referendum that cut across the standard division of Right and Left and was overseen by a conservative incumbent.