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Crisis governance and the changing nature of crises have been analysed from different theoretical angles in political science, leading to a burgeoning debate on effects on democratic polities. Concepts such as resilience, agility and robust governance have been put forward recently to make sense of how democracies face and react to different types of challenges, ranging from sudden shocks such as the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, to more long-term creeping crises like humanitarian migration and climate change.
This panel aims to contribute to this debate by putting under the spotlight the under-theorized relations between political power and crisis governance in contemporary democratic systems. We aim to address the following questions: How, and by whom, are crises identified, defined, and communicated? What specific cleavages, actors, and strategies are activated in the “politics of crisis”? How are crisis responses shaped by the interactions between elected political actors, public officials, and societal players intervening at different governance levels and crisis stages? What political and non-political factors account for crisis governance and its effectiveness in different contexts – local, regional, national, and supranational? How do different types of crises – sudden vs creeping – matter for policy actors’ relations in the face of crisis governance? Finally, how do crises and their aftermath challenge and reshape political institutions?
We welcome papers that engage with these and other questions at the intersection of crisis and democratic politics, taking different perspectives in terms of:
- theoretical and analytical approaches, e.g. robust governance, resilience, agility, multilevel governance etc.
- methodological strategies, including quantitative, qualitative and mixed-methods approaches;
- empirical focus, including single case studies as well as comparative research on different countries, regions, cities/localities, and/or institutional contexts.