The mistake made during the pre-election period is the frequent repetition of the platitude, especially on election day, that elections it is the quintessence or peak moment of democracy. Perhaps this would have been the case if the help of other participants in the liberal democracy had been as strong.

For many years Institute for Varieties of Democracybased in Gothenburg, Sweden, evaluates the quality of democracy around the world using dozens of variables, so elections are just one of five key factors/indicators of modern democracy. The other four are participation (in civil society, self-government and regional administration), public consultation (open and mandatory dialogue about practice), equality (in access to public goods and protection of civil liberties), liberal rule of law (individual rights, executive control and countermeasures).

If elections alone were enough to automatically characterize a regime as democratic, then the case of many countries in which it would be absurd to classify them as democracies during elections would remain a mystery. These are countries of “competitive authoritarianism” (for example, Turkey, Russia), illiberal democracies (for example, Hungary), semi-democratic regimes where elections give muddy nominal democracy, but in fact operate on the basis of authoritarian politics, and not emancipatory values. There are also countries whose regimes are also described with a relatively old, but infrequently used and certainly difficult to translate (albeit anti-credit) neocracy. The mixture of democratic, anarchist and authoritarian elements contributes to the delegitimization of power and instability, so that these countries slide into dictatorship (for example, Sudan, Eritrea, Somalia, Thailand, Burma, etc.)

It would be nonsense to claim that stable democracies (including the Greek one) are protected from the above pathogens. Successive crises exacerbate the situation of insecure and declining legitimacy, electoral fluidity, and distrust of political personnel, chiefdoms, and most political institutions. Of course, the choice of voters is a multifactorial process in which emotional closeness to at least one party, the economic interest of voters, the so-called “performance of victory”, the electoral system play a role. However, for many years there has been intolerance towards parties, which has often resulted in abstention from participation in first and second class elections, negative voting, selection of parties that voters do not trust, increased voting vacillation between individual contests.

At the same time, it is necessary to take into account how citizens themselves use elections as a mechanism for selecting candidates. From Round 7 of the World Values ​​Survey (WVS) co-hosted by EKKE and Dianeosis in 2017, we found that:

Almost everyone agrees on the importance of fair elections. However, every third believes that “the rich are buying them”, while 37% said that those responsible for their actions are not impartial. Also, one in three believed that “very often” or “often” voters are bribed (37%). Much more problematic is the data on the perception of news coverage of the elections, which, of course, is associated with the almost eternal distrust of the Greek population (and not only) in the media, on which they simultaneously and paradoxically depend for their information. . Thus, the vast majority believed that journalists were inaccurate in covering elections (70%) and that the news favored the ruling party (67%), which is systematically observed on television in many countries across the spectrum of political journalism, regardless of the period.

Therefore, it is not surprising that the majority (50.2%) said they did not trust the elections as an institution, and 3.5% did not express an opinion on the relevant issue. The fact that only 46.3% trusted the institution of democracy par excellence is another indicator of political intolerance and alienation from certain political institutions (parties, governments, trade unions, media, etc.), which is systematically recorded and studied in Greece by political sociologists. and public opinion analysts since the 1990s. Especially in terms of electoral credibility, Greece converges and diverges compared to other countries that participated in the WVS. It converges, say, with other Balkan countries, the United States and some Latin American countries, and diverges from the northern European countries.

The observed similarities and differences are due both to fluctuations in the situation during the measurement and to the constants of the political system and political culture of each country. However, and this we must keep in mind, they are tendencies that indicate the conditions and limits of the democratic legitimization of political power.

**Mr. Nikos Demertzis is Professor of Political Sociology and Communication at EKPA.