Ο λαός ξεχνά τι σημαίνει Δεξιά: Η αντιδεξιά προκατάληψη ως (φθίνον) στοιχείο της ελληνικής πολιτικής κουλτούρας

Abstract

Since the fall of the military dictatorship in Greece, the notion of the ‘Right’, as a shortcut used to denote politically conservative and economically liberal policies, has been given negative normative connotations. The reasons for this tendency can be traced historically in the post-civil-war political system. This led to the conversion of the typical Left/Right cleavage into what is often referred to as the distinction between the right and the ‘anti-right’. Although there are many studies focusing on the historical sources of this phenomenon and the role of parties in this process, its implications on public opinion and more generally on the formation of the Greek political culture during the last three decades have not been systematically analyzed. Thus, questions such as why New Democracy, which appears according to its manifestos’ coding as a relatively modest conservative party, is perceived by the electorate as the most right-wing party of Europe at least until the end of the 1980s remain unanswered. Focusing on this very aspect of the anti-right cleavage, we propose a model that enables the systematic exploration of an ‘anti-right bias’ and we show that this inclination is much less apparent among the youth and more particularly among voters who started voting after 1993. We conclude that the change in the physiognomy of the two major parties and especially PASOK during this period, as well as the normalization and routinization of the political system, have led to the partial at least transformation of the Greek Right from a by-product of a historical reality characterized by a lack of ideological legitimization, to a legitimized political ideology, analogous to the one represented by the party families of this ideological spectrum in Europe.