This inquiry traces development of politeness-linked features in English-Greek samples of translated political science discourse. A pilot study first distinguishes a set of shift types between the English and Greek versions of John Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty (1869,1983) tracing a prevailing set of positive politeness shifts in the Greek target version, often balanced with some negative politeness ones. An experiment follows, exploring a rendition of three politeness devices which are claimed to realize quality, social identity and relational aspects of facework (Spencer-Oatey 2007), in samples from two Greek versions (1990, 2005) of John Locke’s The Second Treatise. Findings demonstrate that there is variation between retranslations in the treatment of these devices over the years. The inquiry farther explores a set of six parallel samples from different political science works and their translations into Greek, with a view to quantitatively verifying the hypothesis that Greek academic discourse is altering under the influence of English academic discourse. Results demonstrate that features are ‘degenerating’ as manifested via the translated versions of these works. Finally an experiment was carried out with translator-trainees, hoping to demonstrate the relative importance of these features (and aspects of facework) from an emic perspective. The inquiry concludes that the relational aspect of facework, which is prioritized by native Greek informants, undergoes some ‘degeneration’ over the years, which seems to suppress the local balance of positive/negative politeness patterns in political science discourse. The finding is presumed to be an effect of globalization suppressing locally prioritized aspects of facework.