Barriers to Innovation in Southern European Public Bureaucracies: A Context-Based Analysis of the Greek Experience

The paper draws on primary data to assess public sector innovation in the socio-political context of Southern Europe. It focuses on Greece, a country that represents the neo-patrimonial version of the Napoleonic state. The Greek public sector has faced significant challenges in implementing large-scale innovations. The deep-seated causes behind these difficulties are structural and cannot be changed in the short/medium run because of the mismatch between the imported, alien to the country, state models and the domestic informal institutions. Still, existing state structures can be rationalized, mainly through top-down coordination mechanisms to implement large-scale innovations.