When do crises centralise decision-making? The core executive in the Greek economic crisis

Abstract

When can crises overcome the fragmentation of a core executive and facilitate a centralised management response? Here, we identify the latter by reference to the concept of a ‘crisis response network’ (CRN). We draw on several literatures that refer to crisis centralisation and develop hypotheses that comprise likely contributing factors. We explore these hypotheses in the setting of a core executive normally identified as being ‘segmentary’, but which has exhibited centralised management of past crises, and in the context of an acute economic crisis: that is, Greece in its debt crisis in two seminal periods. Based on extensive interviews with all the senior personnel involved, including both Prime Ministers, as well as documentary evidence, we find that the strength of the CRN in leading the crisis response varied and that this was consistent with our hypotheses. We consider the conceptual and empirical implications of our findings.