There is a widespread feeling today that the institutions of the Greek political system are not functioning properly. All the opinion polls, for the past two decades, confirm the dissatisfaction of Greek citizens, especially towards the "political society" and its bodies. The crisis of the political system is closely related to the issue of the state's ability and administrative mechanisms to respond with effective public policies to the new challenges of the risk society. Moreover, Greek governments have very low performance in terms of their ability to implement the policies they pursue, except when it comes to policies that reproduce the clientelistic system.

The political parties are at the center of the crisis, becoming increasingly less intermediaries between citizens and the state, and increasingly self-referential mechanisms, which are particularly interested in their reproduction and governed by a logic of "imperialistic" expansion in all areas of political life, even those that do not fall within the logic of the party phenomenon. Furthermore, the corruption that persists within the political class is certainly not the only form of corruption in Greece, but it is the one that erodes social cohesion the most and has become the main cause of increasing dissatisfaction with political parties.

The contributions included in this volume focus on these and other critical problems of the functioning of the Greek political system.

The texts included are:

- Evangelos Venizelos, "Can there be a political system without a crisis?"
- Anastasios-Ioannis D. Metaxas, "Power shifts in the Greek political system"
- Konstantinos Tsoukalas, "Political crisis, crisis of values"
- Xenophon I. Kontiadis, "Party system and constitutional politics. Observations on the politics and constitutional engineering of the revision process."
- Kostas H. Chrysogonos, "The hidden charm of dynastic rule. The crisis of the political system and the emergence of the prime minister."
- Charalambos Th. Anthopoulos, "The Greek political system as a partyocracy"
- Antonis Makrydimitris, "Good legislation as a prerequisite for effectiveness and quality of governance"
- Dimitris Melissas, "Non-application of the law. A form of political crisis?"
- Panagiotis Karkatsoulis, "The future discount of legislative functioning in Greece"
- Georgios Katrougalos, "The crisis (?) of Justice. Problems of legitimizing judicial power."
- Kalliopi Spanou, "Independent authorities: Crisis, evolution or upgrading of the political system?"
- Georgios Sotirelis, "The upgrading of Local Government as a response to the crisis of the political system"
- Theodoros Tsekos, "The ongoing Greek administrative crisis: On the reformist idiosyncrasy of a non-Weberian bureaucracy"
- Michalis Spourdalakis, Efthymis Papavlasopoulos, "Parties, interest groups and transformations in the representation system. Beyond the theories of crisis."
- Dimitris Sotiropoulos, "Labor relations and open questions in the literature on Greek civil society"
- Takis Kafetzis, "The dead end of the political crisis in a privatizing political culture"
- Kostas Botopoulos, "On the 'political crisis': A proposal for demythologization"