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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Polit. Sci.
Sec. Comparative Governance
Volume 6 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpos.2024.1480799
This article is part of the Research Topic Public Policies in the Era of PermaCrisis View all 8 articles

"Assessing Greece's Social Vulnerability Patterns in Times of Perma-Crisis

Provisionally accepted
Michail Melidis Michail Melidis 1Stylianos I. Tzagkarakis Stylianos I. Tzagkarakis 2*Nikos Papadakis Nikos Papadakis 3
  • 1 University of Exeter, Exeter, England, United Kingdom
  • 2 School of Social Sciences, Hellenic Open University, Patras, Greece
  • 3 University of Crete, Rethymno, Greece

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The study aims to map and analyse the development of social vulnerability patterns in Greece through a perma-crisis context (economic crisis, austerity, covid-19, energy, and inflation crisis) over the period 2008-2022. The paper rests on the construction of a composite index of four key pillars of social vulnerability (employment, living conditions, health, and education) consisting of 15 selected variables obtained from the official Eurostat datasets. Our findings show that social vulnerability patterns in Greece demonstrate a considerable shift during the stated period where certain social groups (i.e., NEETs and precarious workers) seem to suffer the most. The first pattern (2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(2013)(2014)(2015)(2016) is largely characterized by the intensity and severity of the economic crisis and austerity measures, which contributed to the exacerbation of social vulnerability. The second pattern (2017-2022) presents a gradual decline mainly due to the recovery of the economy and a decrease in unemployment rates featuring a strong tendency to reach the pre-crisis levels in the years to come. The high levels of social vulnerability leading to social exclusion, poverty, and the widening of inequalities, impede the country's resilience and recovery efforts and undermine social cohesion.

    Keywords: social vulnerability, Multidimensional crisis, austerity, index, Inequalities, social cohesion, Public Policy, Greece

    Received: 14 Aug 2024; Accepted: 10 Oct 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Melidis, Tzagkarakis and Papadakis. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Stylianos I. Tzagkarakis, School of Social Sciences, Hellenic Open University, Patras, 263 35, Greece

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