1 Understanding Crisis Leadership

Political Leadership in Times of Crisis

Chris Ansell, Arjen Boin, and Paul 't Hart
The Oxford Handbook of Political Leadership
Edited by R. A. W. Rhodes and Paul 't Hart
Print Publication Date: May 2014

Subject: Political Science, Political Behavior, Comparative Politics
Online Publication Date: Jan 2014 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199653881.013.035
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter deals with the challenges and opportunities of leadership in times of crises,
that is, conditions of serious, urgent, and uncertainty-ridden threats to key values and
structures of a community or the polity as a whole. Crisis leadership differs from leader
ship in routine times. Its stakes are much higher, the public is much more attentive, its
mood more volatile, and institutional constraints on elite decision making are consider
ably looser. The chapter reviews the five key challenges of crisis leadership, discusses key
research findings pertaining to each, and provides a strategic agenda for future research.
Keywords: crisis, crisis management, stress, institutional crisis, meaning-making, sensemaking, learning
1 Understanding Crisis Leadership

‘Today there is no longer such a thing as strategy; there is only crisis manage
ment.’
IF this observation by the late US Secretary of Defence, Robert McNamara, was meant to sug
gest that the nature of foreign policy had changed as a result of the Cuban missile crisis, he was
surely wrong. If, however, he meant that in today’s world, political leaders may well be defined
in terms of their performance under pressure and stress, he was right.1 Modern societies are be
sieged by a wide variety of natural and man-made disruptions—ranging from unprecedented nat
ural disasters to new forms of terrorism, from climate change to tectonic shifts in the interna
tional order, from financial mayhem to cybercrime.
Citizens worry about their safety and security in the face of these threats (Beck 1999;
OECD 2003). They expect their leaders and government to protect them against threats
and fears, whether ‘real’ or ‘imagined’ (Furedi 2005). When major disruptions do occur,
they expect them to provide comprehensive response and recovery operations, embody
the collective determination, punish the guilty (or take the blame), and learn the right
lessons.
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Just as crisis politics differs from politics as usual, crisis leadership differs from leader
ship in routine times. Its stakes are much higher, the public is much more attentive, its
mood more volatile, and institutional constraints on elite decision making are (p. 419) con
siderably looser. Fundamentally ambiguous, crises provide political elites with power
chances and with acute threats to their legitimacy (Edelman 1977). Likewise crises can
be more stressful and easier for leaders to master than ‘politics as usual’.
This makes political leadership in times of crisis an important topic of study. In this chap
ter we examine the fruits of the efforts of scholars across a range of disciplines to docu
ment and interpret the challenges, behaviour, and impacts of political leaders during
crises. First we briefly signal the various sources of crisis leadership research across the
social sciences.
2 A Broad Church
Insight into political crisis leadership comes from many sources. First, in political biogra
phy, the crises that happened during the careers of leaders always play a stark role. It
seems, in fact, one cannot write about political leaders without mentioning crises
(Neustadt 1990). Richard Nixon (1962) grasped this when he entitled his mid-career auto
biography, Six Crises. George W. Bush’s (2010) recent memoirs likewise are entirely orga
nized around a few critical calls he made during his term in office.
In comparative politics studies of political development, elite statecraft during crises

played a key role (Binder et al. 1971; Almond, Flanagan, and Mundt 1973; Linz and
Stepan 1978). Early scholarship in this area was inspired by the collapse of the Weimar
government and similar episodes of ‘loss of democratic authenticity’. Constitutional schol
ars and political theorists debated the merits of crisis government, conceiving of it as a
trade-off between the constitutional need to enable state elites to wield extraordinary ex
ecutive powers in the face of existential threats, and the risk that such provisions could
be hijacked by ruthless political leaders seeking to hijack and abuse state power
(Friedrich 1963; Bracher 1971). Shades of this debate were visible decades later in cri
tiques of post 9/11 counter terrorism policies and legal reforms (Wolf 2007).
A separate and very productive strand of crisis scholarship developed in the 1960s within
International Relations, particularly the subfield of foreign policy analysis. It was trig
gered academically by intensive studies of the escalation of the Summer 1914 crisis (Hol
sti 1972), the Korean War (Paige 1968), the Cuban missile crisis (Allison 1971; Bell 1971),
and a growing range of comparative and multi-case monographs and collections (Her
mann 1972; George and Smoke 1974; Snyder and Diesing 1977; Brecher 1993).
Two strands of theory emerged from it. The first strand offers detailed propositions on
elite decision making under conditions of crisis, focusing strongly on the effects which
stress and centralized and informal structures of decision making have upon the judge
ment of political leaders and their advisers. The second strand develops propositions
about the dynamics of ‘brinkmanship’ in international crises, employing game theory, cog
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nitive psychology, and communications analysis to study how the leaders’ perceptions,
calculi, and signals to their adversaries shaped crisis (de-) (p. 420) escalation processes
and outcomes (Jervis 1976; Lebow 1981; Jervis, Lebow, and Stein 1985).
During the 1980s, scholars in the field of public policy and public administration started
to study crises. One strand of this scholarship has focused on how government structures
and processes change in response to having to deal with the unexpected, the undesirable,
and the uncertainties which crises entail. It has since produced a wide array of case stud
ies and comparative analyses yielding its own set of generalizations about the determi
nants of public sector resilience in the face of extreme adversity (Rosenthal, Charles, and
’t Hart 1989; Rosenthal, Boin, and Comfort 2001; Drennan and McConnell 2007). Another
strand has conceptualized crises as ‘critical junctures’ in politics and public policy. Its
proponents have demonstrated that crises are ‘focusing events’ which ‘punctuate’ the in
stitutional status quo. This creates possibilities for advocates of change to exercise a form
of ‘situational leadership’: to call publicly into question existing policy paradigms and in
stitutional practices, and use the ‘window of opportunity’ provided by public outrage and
political imperatives to forge coalitions for non-incremental reforms (Kingdon 1984; Keel
er 1993; Birkland 2006; Kuipers 2006).
Over time, a genuinely interdisciplinary venture has emerged, held together by a key
foundational premise: that conditions of crisis—high threat, urgency, and deep uncertain
ty—evoke political and psychological mechanisms that change the way in which people,
organizations, governments, polities, and media act and interact, yielding both great chal
lenges and great opportunities for the exercise of public leadership. As the study of crisis
leadership is fragmented across and beyond the political science field, however, it is help
ful to understand how scholars have defined crises and the leadership challenges that
they entail.
In structural-functionalist accounts, a crisis is most often defined as an urgent threat to

the core values or critical systems of a society (for example, an acute threat of violent
conflict and war), that must be addressed under conditions of deep uncertainty and risk
(Rosenthal, Charles, and ’t Hart 1989; Brecher 1993). From a broader systemic perspec
tive, the term crisis is used to describe a turning point in the evolution, ‘life cycle’,
‘health’, and legitimacy of governing elites, policy paradigms, political regimes, or even
the political system as a whole. For example, within party politics, acute drops in polls,
major electoral losses, political scandals, and overt challenges by competitors all consti
tute crises from the perspective of incumbent party elites. Likewise, policy fiascos, imple
mentation failures, major economic downturns, and/or fiscal stress, can acutely threaten
the political efficacy and legitimacy of the beliefs, values, problem definitions, institution
al structures, and coalitions underpinning current policies and programmes (’t Hart 1993;
Bovens and ’t Hart 1996; Boin and ’t Hart 2000).
Crises can pertain to policy issues, sectors, or organizations, but can also threaten the
status quo of entire regimes and political systems. Such macro-level crises can be in
duced by major shifts in the geostrategic (the end of the Cold War) or economic (the
Page 3 of 18

1970s OPEC price hikes and the 2008 financial meltdown) balance of power. They can al
so emerge through an escalation of domestic socio-economic and ethnopolitical (p. 421)
tensions, spill-over effects of regional conflict, or breakdowns in civil–military relations
(Linz and Stepan 1978, 1996; Tilly and Tarrow 2006; Boix and Stokes 2007).
As noted, crisis analysis has developed as a broad epistemological and methodological

church. Modernist-empiricist approaches abound in international relations and disaster
studies. Conversely, many other crisis scholars cite the Thomas theorem (‘if men define
their situations as real, they are real in their consequences’) to argue that it is percep
tions of crisis—however exaggerated, manufactured, or delusional—that matter most, re
quiring the analyst to reconstruct actors’ beliefs and interpretations of events as much as
the events themselves (Thomas and Thomas 1928). On that view, crises exist when actors
not only publicly frame (which political leaders are always tempted to do opportunistical
ly) but privately believe particular situations to be threatening, urgent, and highly uncer
tain—no matter what the statistics, experts, or impartial observers say.2
3 Dissecting Crisis Leadership

Any approach to crisis leadership must take into account the fact that political leaders
(particularly, but not exclusively government leaders) in times of crises are often called
upon to juggle at least three distinctive roles: sovereign, facilitator, and symbol. As a sov
ereign, a crisis leader is called upon to make authoritative decisions about the deploy
ment of state resources to intervene in the crisis; as a facilitator, leaders are meta-gover
nors who mobilize and align the actions of different stakeholders; and as symbol, the
leadership role is iconic for both the response effort and the political community at large.
These roles can be complementary. Heads of government, for example, may call upon
their sovereign and symbolic powers to strengthen their capacity to effectively facilitate
crisis coordination; and yet these roles can also be in tension during a crisis. It is by un
derstanding these tensions that we can more fully understand the challenges of crisis
leadership. As sovereigns, crisis leaders must make authoritative decisions. Their authori
ty gives them the power to initiate and direct. The facilitative role, by contrast, often re
quires crisis leaders to recognize that power is shared and hence that they must operate
more by negotiation than by direction (Waugh and Streib 2006). In both their sovereign
and facilitative role, crisis leaders may find that they are sending signals that are in con
flict with their symbolic task of reassuring the public.
Each of these roles can be complex and can produce unintended consequences. For exam
ple, crisis leaders are called upon to make final, authoritative decisions. The price of this
authority, however, is a heightened demand for accountability, or at least, intense (p. 422)
public scrutiny. This authority–accountability nexus places crisis leaders at the centre of
the ‘blame game’, which frequently permeates a crisis and its aftermath.
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This description of sovereign, facilitative, and symbolic roles reinforces why it is often so
difficult to separate crisis leadership from crisis outcomes. As the sovereign, the crisis
leader has the ‘final’ authority and is ultimately given credit or held responsible for good
decisions (often judged in hindsight). As the facilitator, the crisis leader is expected to en
sure that any barrier to effective action is removed. As a symbol, the crisis leader is an
icon of both the response and of the political community in crisis.
Following Selznick’s (1957) work on institutional leadership, we conceptualize crisis lead

ership as a set of functions that—one way or the other—will need to be performed, often
repeatedly over the course of an evolving crisis. Who ought to perform these functions is
partly a legal but mostly a matter of strategic judgement. How and by whom they actually
get performed in any given crisis is a matter of empirical research. How well existing gov
ernmental and other political leaders perform them is a matter of evaluation research,
which presupposes normative criteria for ‘good’ crisis management, an analytic leap that
very few crisis scholars have dared to make. Following Boin et al. (2005), we highlight
five core tasks of political crisis management:
1. Sense-making. Political leaders are expected to make authoritative interpretations

of the causes, characteristics, dynamics, and consequences of an emerging crisis.
They must ‘test’ emerging realities (Burke and Greenstein 1989). While they are of
ten supported in this task by experts and information systems, the responsibility ulti
mately falls to political leaders to decide how to cut through the uncertainty, ambigu
ity, and competing interpretations to authorize a working theory of the situation.
2. Shaping responses. Political leaders are expected to provide direction and coordi
nation to the emerging crisis response network. A response may be orchestrated via
well-established professional roles and organizational protocols, requiring little di
rection. However, political leaders are called upon to ensure that these roles and pro
tocols unfold as expected, that exceptional circumstances are handled, and that
emerging needs are anticipated in a timely way. Moreover, political leaders are ex
pected to make critical decisions (the ‘hard calls’) that set priorities and make diffi
cult trade-offs.
3. Meaning making. Political leadership pertains to the act of defining a crisis: ‘sov
ereign is he who decides on the exceptional case’, as Carl Schmitt (1985: 5) famously
remarked. Political leaders face the delicate task of explaining to citizens and stake
holders what the nature of the crisis is and what is being done to minimize the crisis.
They are expected to maintain and restore trust in government. They must ensure
that the response itself is regarded as legitimate.
4. Account giving after a crisis. Political leaders are expected to manage the process
of expert, media, legislative, and judicial inquiry and debate in such a way that re
sponsibilities are clarified and accepted, destructive blame games are avoided, and a
degree of catharsis is achieved (Boin, McConnell, and ’t Hart 2008).
(p. 423)
5. Learning. Political leaders are expected to organize the process that culls lessons
from the crisis, translating these lessons into reform initiatives that will help prevent
similar crises (Stern 1997).
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This task-based approach allows crisis analysts to make a distinction between the immediate re
sponse phase (sense-making, shaping the response, meaning-making) and the crisis aftermath
(account-giving and learning). This is purely an analytical distinction, as the tasks typically play
out simultaneously, during and after the crisis; and yet they enable us to organize our discussion
of the vast literature that deals with the various dimensions of political crisis management.
Making Sense of Crisis
After a crisis, leaders are often asked why they ‘did not see it coming’. History is replete
with examples of leaders ‘sleepwalking’ into crisis (think of the First World War, Pearl
Harbor, the Yom Kippur War, or the 2008–9 financial crisis). Whereas they may not have
received proper warnings before a crisis, leaders can drown in information during a cri
sis. In many crises, leaders struggle with the mountains of raw data (reports, rumours,
pictures) that are quickly amassed for them when something extraordinary happens.
Turning them into a coherent picture of the situation is a major challenge by itself. All
this adds up to the challenge of sense-making (Weick 2001).
Sense-making refers to the capacity of leaders to recognize that an urgent threat is

emerging which requires remedial action. In addition, it refers to their capacity to grasp
an unfolding crisis process, to understand what can be done to stop it or minimize its im
pact. Sense-making has at least two dimensions: a social-psychological and a political
one.
Scholarship has described in much detail the human capacity to make sense of dynamic
and threatening environments. Psychological research demonstrates that most people
find it extremely hard to recognize deviating patterns and are masterful at deceiving
themselves into thinking that ‘it will not happen to them’ (Kahneman 2011). They use
cognitive short cuts to simplify their information-processing loads, are prone to biases in
assessing evidence, and have difficulty acknowledging facts that are inconsistent with
their existing view of the world. In a crisis, this problem becomes even harder.
Scholars of foreign policy crises and international conflict management, in particular,

have made use of the psychological perspective. They have given us a wealth of in-depth,
structure-focused comparative studies of how leaders, their advisers, and their bureau
cracies operate when interstate relations are on the brink of war and peace, or have de
scended into open warfare. These studies show how the personalities, beliefs, emotions,
interpersonal styles, information-processing proclivities and communication propensities
of political leaders shape crisis management processes (Janis 1972; (p. 424) Lebow 1981;
Vertzberger 1990; Brecher 1993; Schafer and Crichlow 2010).3 This research strongly
suggests that the pre-existing world views or dominant frames of leaders heavily affect
how they see the world and understand the causes of crisis (Welch Larson 1994; Boin, ’t
Hart, and Van Esch 2012). The so-called threat–rigidity thesis holds that under crisis-in
duced stress leaders rigidly cling to their world view and old behavioural patterns.
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The small groups who support leaders during crisis processes might, in theory, compen
sate for individual shortcomings. Research shows, however, that under stress and duress,
and when structured and led in an unhelpful fashion, small groups can become dysfunc
tional sense-making units (’t Hart, Stern, and Sundelius 1997), as witnessed in the Bush
administration’s handling of, for example, post-invasion Iraq (Badie 2010) and hurricane
Katrina (’t Hart et al. 2009). Tensions between bureaucratic units may further undermine
sense-making capacities, especially when units refuse to share information (Rosenthal, ’t
Hart, and Kouzmin 1991). For example, the tug of war between various agencies in the
US intelligence ‘community’ prevented Presidents Clinton and Bush from grasping the
impending threats of suicidal terrorism on American soil (Parker and Stern 2005). Also,
intergovernmental or party-political tensions between key players—think of the relations
between the mayor of New Orleans and the governor of Louisiana during the immediate
aftermath of hurricane Katrina—may undermine the effective communication that is re
quired in order to arrive at a common operational picture.
Shaping Responses
President George W. Bush prided himself on being the ‘decision-maker in chief’. He epito
mized the common idea that presidents are the ultimate decision makers in times of cri
sis. The key assumption here is that in times of crisis someone—preferably the political
leader—has to make the truly crucial decisions. (‘The buck stops here’, as a sign read on
President Truman’s desk.)
Not surprisingly, the first generation of crisis leadership studies trained its focus on crisis
decision making (Janis 1989). Scholars asked why political leaders made (or refrained
from making) certain decisions (and non-decisions) that in hindsight proved critical to the
shaping of crisis responses.
Critical choices that must be resolved at the political level are in fact quite rare during
most crises and disasters. Particularly when it concerns large-scale, fast-moving emer
gencies, crisis responses emerge from the bottom-up at least as much as they are de
signed, planned for, and directed from the top-down. To try and have it any other way
amounts to inviting delay and paralysis, as crisis responses grind to a halt when the
(p. 425) centre insists on comprehensive control of operations: it will be overwhelmed by
the sheer volume of communications and demands for urgent decisions (’t Hart, Rosen
thal, and Kouzmin 1993; Waugh and Streib 2006; Moynihan 2007).
In fact, many of the decisions that shape the course of crises only turn out to be ‘critical’
in hindsight. The key challenge for political executives is to recognize which decisions
should be made at the strategic level. Empirical studies show that an effective response
entails more than making critical decisions. It is about coordination: organizing a re
sponse in which everybody who should be involved is involved, knows what should be
done, and accomplishes set tasks in time. Leaders appear most effective when they facili
tate and safeguard effective collaboration between responding organizations.
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This challenge of strategic crisis coordination is not an easy one (Boin and ’t Hart 2012).
In fact, as the doyen of disaster sociology Enrico Quarantelli (1988) once observed, coor
dination often poses more problems than it helps to solve. To understand how hard it is,
we must realize crisis coordination has two dimensions: vertical and horizontal
coordination.
Vertical coordination pertains to the orchestration of activities between subordinate

units. It can be politically expedient to be seen in charge of a response network—or not to
be seen at all. It is a tool to assume power or to avoid responsibility. Students of presiden
tial disaster declarations have shown the political character of vertical coordination. Issu
ing a disaster declaration is a symbolically powerful act with few negative side effects
(Sylves 2008). Presidential opponents understand that as well. After hurricane Andrew
struck Florida in the summer of 1992, and a few months before the presidential election,
the (democratic) governor of Florida was reportedly slow to request federal assistance as
he did not want to embellish the standing of President Bush (a Republican) in the eyes of
Floridians.
Such reports, accurate or not, illustrate the often-made observation that crises are oppor
tunities to demonstrate leadership. They are also potential pitfalls for leaders who do not
understand the political nature of crisis management. To their frustration, political lead
ers tend to discover that it is rather hard to coordinate the actions of various administra
tive units. A key example, again, is the response to hurricane Katrina: President Bush,
Governor Blanco, and Mayor Nagin all discovered that being in charge may not mean
much when a leader’s chain of command breaks down under the pressures of crisis.
These insights feed into a core debate in the crisis management subfield centring on the
tension between bottom-up (emergent) crisis response and top-down organization of re
sponse. The emergent perspective suggests that crisis leaders typically have unique skill
sets that are in demand during a specific crisis. These leaders are, however, not necessar
ily those who have been pre-designated to be crisis leaders. The top-down perspective
stresses the leadership vacuum that can arise in chaotic situations and hence emphasizes
the importance of clearly established authority structures.
Horizontal coordination pertains to the orchestration of units that are not hierarchically
related. Political leaders must operate in a ‘shared power’ world to make things happen
(Crosby and Bryson 2005). In large-scale crises, leadership tends to be ‘distributed’
(p. 426) across different jurisdictions and functional domains (Ansell, Boin, and Keller
2010). In federal countries like the United States, it is often not clear who exactly is in
charge when a transboundary crisis (such as a large-scale epidemic) threatens. In the in
ternational arena, it is perfectly clear that no country or organization is in charge when a
transboundary crisis happens. In both cases, crisis leadership can only be informal. It be
comes a matter of persuasion.
An example of effective horizontal coordination is found in President George Bush

Senior’s crafting of an international coalition in response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in
the summer of 1990. Bush managed to bring on board all the actors that mattered at the
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time (including bitter foes) and, what is important, he managed to keep the coalition to
gether during the brief war and its immediate aftermath. This was a show case of interna
tional crisis diplomacy and coordinated warfare (see George 1991).
Meaning-Making
Carl Friedrich (1963: 94) observed that ‘men’s finite minds need the myth for the purpose
of mastering their situation’. This is even truer in crisis, marked by deep uncertainty and
pervasive confusion with regard to its causes and consequences, and the required actions
to deal with this emerging threat (Barton 1969). In normal times, societal institutions pro
vide and maintain what Friedrich referred to as a ‘sustaining myth’. A crisis indicates that
the key institutions have broken down and have stopped providing meaning (Turner
1978; ’t Hart 1993). An important task of political leaders is to fill the vacuum and restore
trust in institutions whose effectiveness, reliability, and/or integrity appear to have been
severely compromised by crisis.
In a crisis, people expect their leaders to reduce uncertainty and provide an authoritative
account of what is going on, why it is happening and what needs to be done. The chal
lenge of meaning-making is to communicate an unprecedented and threatening event po
litically while taking into account the politically charged issue of causation, responsibility,
and accountability. It is not enough to offer a story; leaders must get others to accept
their definition of the situation.
Public leaders are not the only ones trying to frame the crisis. Their messages coincide
and compete with those of other parties, who hold other positions and interests, who are
likely to espouse various alternative definitions of the situation and advocate different
courses of action. Contestants manipulate, strategize, and fight to have their frame ac
cepted as the dominant narrative (’t Hart 1993; Tarrow 1994; Brändström and Kuipers
2003). If other actors succeed in dominating the meaning-making process, the ability of
incumbent leaders to decide and manœuvre is severely constrained.
Crisis communication is thus an important element of political leadership. Political lead

ers, however, are often constrained in their capacity effectively to communicate, as cor
rect information is rarely available in the early phases of a crisis when the need for mean
ing is possibly at its peak. Providing the public with accurate, clear, and actionable infor
mation can also be hindered by the collective stress pervading crisis-affected (p. 427) com
munities (Barton 1969). Moreover, they do not necessarily see the government as their al
ly.
Crises are a mixed-motive game for incumbent governments. They offer executive leaders
the opportunity to show that they are caring yet statesmanlike leaders: calm, composed,
and committed when under pressure. They also, however, make incumbent leaders a like
ly target of blame games. Particularly if they have been in office for a while, they may find
it difficult to avoid being held to account for alleged regulatory failures, mismanagement
of projects and programmes, or failures of interagency coordination that media coverage
and inquiry reports suggest have contributed either to the escalation of latent vulnerabili
Page 9 of 18

ties or to inadequate responses to exogenously triggered crises (Boin et al. 2010). Politi
cal leaders may, consequently, lose control over the emerging crisis narrative to their crit
ics and contenders, who push alternative interpretations and seek to exploit the crisis to
advocate political and policy change (Primo and Cobb 2003).
Account-Giving
Once the acute phase of a crisis has ended, it is tempting for leaders to return to (a new)
normal. Most case studies of crisis show that the aftermath of a crisis typically presents
leaders with new and complex challenges, which may threaten their political survival.
This has little to do with the role leaders play in shaping the material responses to crises.
It has everything to do with the way in which they seek to manage, or fail to manage, po
litical consequences as well as policy implications of the crisis.
While a crisis de-legitimizes power and authority relationships, it often fuels demand for
accountability and the allocation of blame, which places the roles and choices of govern
ment leaders in stark perspective. Accountability rituals offer opposition leaders and
moral entrepeneurs chances of inflicting damage on incumbent office-holders and other
bulwarks of the status quo; none of whom, however, are going to take this lying
down.Crisis-induced accountability processes have therefore been conceptualized as
‘framing contests’ (Boin, McConnell, and ’t Hart 2008). Their outcomes are hard to pre
dict (Kuipers and ’t Hart, forthcoming). For example, the German Chancellor Gerhard
Schröder miraculously emerged as the winner of the national elections following his well-
performed role as the nation’s symbolic ‘crisis manager’ during the riverine floods in
2002 (Bytzek 2008). The Spanish reigning party, on the other hand, suffered a stunning
electoral loss in the immediate aftermath of the Madrid train bombings of 2004 (Olmeda
2008). President George W. Bush saw his hitherto modest approval ratings soar in the
wake of the 9/11 attacks and exploited his political capital to implement structural re
forms; but an already unpopular Bush administration further lost prestige in the after
math of hurricane Katrina (Boin et al. 2010). The emerging literature on blame manage
ment has only just begun to address the mechanisms determining the fate of office-hold
ers in the wake of major disturbances and scandals (Brändström, Kuipers, and Daleus
2008; Hood 2011).
(p. 428) Learning
Crises invite self-examination. They create a need to know why it happened and provide a
strong impulse to never let it happen again. What lessons are to be drawn by whom,
when, and how, is an important political question as much as it is one of institutional de
sign of ‘learning capacity’. An important leadership role in crisis is therefore to engage
with the felt need for learning, and, normatively, to protect the integrity of the learning
process from the heat and harshness of accountability politics. At the same time, learning
itself can be an intensely political question, particularly when the crisis experience is in
voked by proponents in ongoing struggles about continuity and change in policies and in
stitutions. As noted above, crises can be an important vehicle for driving change in are
Page 10 of 18

nas otherwise stabilized by the forces of path dependence, inheritance, and veto-playing
(Hay 2002; Kuipers 2006; Klein 2007).
Analysts should not make the mistake of equating ‘change’ with ‘learning’, or seeing the
former as an indicator that the latter has occurred. Crises give rise not only to symbolic,
hasty, and opportunistic policy gestures, but also to regulatory overkill. Both may be initi
ated by leaders who feel the need to be (seen to be) ‘doing something’, without bothering
to wait for the slow diagnostic and reflective work of learning to be completed.
4 An Agenda for Crisis Leadership Studies

We organized our overview of the literature on crisis leadership in terms of five functional
tasks that crisis leaders are called upon to perform. In this concluding section, we shift
our attention to what we do not yet know and what we would like to know. We see several
prominent agenda points for future research on political crisis management.
First, we need to know more about public expectations of political leadership in crisis.
The studies discussed in this chapter seem to agree that in a time of crisis the public
looks to its political executives to demonstrate leadership. But it is not always clear what,
exactly, the public expects from its leaders during a crisis. Moreover, expectations may
vary. To understand political behaviour in times of crisis, we must know more about pub
lic expectations in those times.
Second, we need more research on the effects of leadership on the process and outcomes
of crisis management, starting with crisis prevention and going all the way through to re
covery and learning. Assessments of this relation tend to be somewhat impressionistic at
best (see Janis 1989). We do not have a really good picture of success and failure factors
(but we understand failure better than success). In hindsight, when considering crisis
prevention, political leaders are all too often blamed for not recognizing the crisis in time
(‘they did not see it coming’). To foresee a crisis, or to recognize an emerging crisis be
fore it escalates, however, one needs a theory of crisis causation (Boin and Smith 2011).
We may well question if such theories exist.
We know that meaning making is important, both during and after a crisis, but we
(p. 429)
do not have a firm theory that explains why some leaders manage to impose their defini
tion of the situation whereas others become enslaved to someone else’s definition. We do
not have a theory that explains why some leaders emerge as statesmen whereas other
leaders lose their job over their crisis performance. We certainly don’t have an encom
passing theory of crisis leadership that connects the performance on all crisis tasks with
the personality traits, leadership styles, and previous experience of political leaders.
Finally, we need to have more research on what makes political actors effective in per
forming crisis leadership tasks. Current research on the nexus between stress and perfor
mance gives us a good idea of why leaders break down or fail during a crisis. These same
insights, however, cannot explain why some leaders ‘rise to the occasion’: staying calm,
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coming to a clear understanding of the situation, making and communicating critical deci
sions, and combining the need for immediate action with a sound grasp of the longer
term. There is such research on operational emergency commanders (Flin 1996; Klein
1999), but not on political office-holders. This requires answering the notoriously tricky
question of whether the harsh conditions and dilemmas that leaders face under condi
tions of crisis warrant some form of relaxation of the criteria of good governance or ‘ef
fective and democratic’ leadership that we normally apply to evaluate their performance.
This is an area that scholars have only just begun to explore (McConnell 2011).
Recommended Reading
Lebow, R. N. (1981). Between Peace and War: The Nature of International Crisis. Balti
more, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Janis, I. (1982). Groupthink. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
Boin, A., ’t Hart, P., Stern, E., and Sundelius, B. (2005). The Politics of Crisis Manage
ment: Public Leadership Under Pressure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
References
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Addison Wesley Longman.
Almond, G. A., Flanagan, S. C., and Mundt, R. J. (1973). Crisis, Choice and Change: His
torical Studies of Political Development. Boston, MA: Little brown.
Ansell, C., Boin, A., and Keller, A. (2010). ‘Managing Transboundary Crises: Identifying
Building Blocks of an Effective Response System’, Journal of Contingencies and Crisis
Management, 18/4: 195–207.
Badie, D. (2010). ‘Groupthink, Iraq, and the War on Terror: Explaining US Policy Shift to
ward Iraq’, Foreign Policy Analysis, 6: 277–96.
Barton, A. H. (1969). Communities in Disaster. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Beck, U. (1999). World Risk Society. Malden: Blackwell Publishers. (p. 430)
Bell, C. (1971). The Conventions of Crisis: A Study in Diplomatic Management. Oxford:

Oxford University Press.
Binder, L., Pye, L. W., Coleman, J. S., Verba, S., LaPalombara, J., and Weiner, M. (1971).
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Birkland, T. A. (2006). Lessons of Disaster: Policy Change after Catastrophic Events.

Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Page 12 of 18

Boin, A. and ’t Hart, P. (2000). ‘Institutional Crises and Reforms in Policy Sectors’, in H.
Wagenaar (ed.), Government Institutions: Effects, Changes and Normative Foundations.
Dordrecht: Kluwer, 150–76.
Boin, A. and ’t Hart, P. (2012). ‘Aligning Executive Action in Times of Adversity: The Poli
tics of Crisis Co-ordination’, in M. Lodge and K. Wegrich (eds), Executive Politics in Times
of Crisis. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 179–96.
Boin, A. and Smith, D. (2011). ‘The Importance of Failure Theories in Assessing Crisis
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77–87.
Boin, A., ’t Hart, P., Stern, E., and Sundelius, B. (2005). The Politics of Crisis Manage
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Boin, A., McConnell, A., and ’t Hart, P., eds. (2008) Governing after Crisis: The Politics of
Investigation, Accountability and Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Boin, A., ’t Hart, P., McConnell, A., and Preston, T. (2010). Leadership Style, Crisis Re
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Boin, A., ’t Hart, P., and Van Esch, F. A. W. J. (2012). ‘Political Leadership in Times of Cri
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Transaction Publishers.
Bracher, K. D. (1971). The German Dictatorship. London: Methuen.
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Understanding the Selective Politicization of Policy Failures’, Government and Opposition,
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P. ’t Hart (eds), Governing After Crisis: The Politics of Investigation, Accountability and
Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 114–47.
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Bush, G. W. (2010). Decision Points. New York: Random House.

Page 13 of 18

Bytzek, E. (2008). ‘Flood Response and Political Survival: Gerhard Schröder and the 2002
Elbe Flood in Germany’, in A. Boin, A. McConnell and P. ’t Hart (eds), Governing After Cri
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Problems in a Shared-Power World. San Francisco: John Wiley and Sons.
Drennan, L. and McConnell, A. (2007). Risk and Crisis Management in the Public Sector.
London: Routledge. (p. 431)
Dyson, S. P. (2009). The Blair Identity. Manchester: Manchester University Press
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Furedi, F. (2005). Politics of Fear. London: Continuum.
George, A. L., ed. (1991). Avoiding War: Problems of Crisis Management. Boulder, CO:
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’t Hart, P. (1993). ‘Symbols, Rituals and Power: The Lost Dimension in Crisis Manage
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’t Hart, P., Rosenthal, U., and Kouzmin, A. (1993). ‘Crisis Decision Making: The Centraliza
tion Thesis Revisited’, Administration and Society, 25/1: 12–45.
’t Hart, P., Stern, E. K., and Sundelius B., eds. (1997). Beyond Groupthink: Political Group
Dynamics and Foreign Policy-making. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press.
’t Hart, P., Tindall, K., Brown, C. (2009), ‘Crisis Leadership of the Bush Presidency: Advi
sory Capacity and Presidential Performance in the Acute Stages of the 9/11 and Katrina
Crises, Presidential Studies Quarterly, 39/3: 473–93
Hay, C. (2002). Political Analysis. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Hermann, C. F. (1972). International Crises: Insights from Behavioral Research. New

York: The Free Press.
Holsti, O. R. (1972). Crisis, Escalation and War. Montreal: McGill-Queens University

Press.
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Hood, C. (2011). The Blame Game: Spin, Bureaucracy and Self Preservation in Govern
ment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Janis, I. L. (1972). Victims of Groupthink. Boston, MA: Houghton, Mifflin.
Janis, I. L. (1989). Crucial Decisions. New York: Free Press.
Jervis, R. (1976). Perception and Misperception in International Politics. Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press.
Jervis, R., Lebow, R. N., and Stein, J. G. (1985). Psychology and Deterrence. Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Keeler, J. T. S. (1993). ‘Opening the Window for Reform: Mandates, Crises and Extraordi
nary Policy Making’, Comparative Political Studies, 25/3: 433–86.
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politan Books.
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Kuipers, S. and ’t Hart, P. (forthcoming). ‘Crisis and Accountability’, in M. Bovens, R. E.

Goodin and T. Schillemans (eds), Oxford Handbook of Public Accountability. Oxford: Ox
ford University Press.
Lebow, R. N. (1981). Between Peace and War: The Nature of International Crisis. Balti
more, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. (p. 432)
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Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe. Baltimore, MD: The Johns
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Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
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McConnell, A. (2011). ‘Success? Failure? Something In-between? A Framework for Evalu

ating Crisis Management’, Policy and Society, 32/2: 63–76.
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ment’, Public Administration, 69/2: 211–33.
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Snyder, G. H. and Diesing, P. (1977). Conflict Among Nations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
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grams. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
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Verbeek, B. (2003). Decision Making in Great Britain During the Suez Crisis. Aldershot:
Ashgate.
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and Perception in Foreign Policy Decisionmaking. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press.
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gency Management’, Public Administration Review, 66/2: 131–40.
Weick, K. (2001). Making Sense of the Organization. Oxford: Blackwell.
Welch Larson, D. (1994). ‘The Role of Belief Systems and Schemas in Foreign Policy Deci
sion-making’, Political-Psychology, 15/S1: 17–33.
Wolf, N. (2007). The End of America. New York: Chelsea Green. (p. 434)
Notes:
(1) The quote is taken from Bell (1971: 2). See also Lord (1998). Dick Neustadt (1990: 5)
wrote in similar vein: ‘Cold war is not a crisis; it becomes a way of life.’
(2) A corollary of this view holds that anything labelled a crisis by the mass media be
comes a crisis for politicians in its consequences through discursive dynamics such as
‘scandal amplification’.
(3) Excellent case studies of, for example, British prime ministers setting their countries
on controversial war paths based on diabolic enemy images and exaggerated self-beliefs
Page 17 of 18

include Verbeek’s (2003) analysis of Anthony Eden and his cabinet during the Suez crisis
and Dyson (2009).
Chris Ansell
Chris Ansell is Professor of Political Science at the University of Californa, Berkeley.

His fields of interest include organization theory, political sociology, public adminis
tration, and Western Europe. His current research focuses on risk regulation, collab
orative governance, social network analysis, and crisis management.
Arjen Boin
Arjen Boin is a professor of public governance and crisis management at the Utrecht
School of Governance and an adjunct professor at the Public Administration Insti
tute, Louisiana State University.
Paul 't Hart
Paul 't Hart is Professor of Public Administration at the Utrecht School of Gover
nance, which he joined in 2001. He is also associate Dean at the Netherlands School
of Government in The Hague. He was previously at Leiden University's Department
of Public Administration from 1987-2004, and has held visiting positions at the Uni
versity of Canberra, Nuffield College Oxford, and the Stockholm Centre of Organiza
tional Research (SCORE) of Stockholm University. Between 2001-2005, he was ad
junct professor of public management at the Swedish Defence College in Stockholm.
He has authored or edited 20 books in English and a further 14 in Dutch.
Page 18 of 18

1 Understanding Crisis Leadership

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Political Leadership in Times of Crisis

Political Leadership in Times of Crisis

Print Publication Date: May 2014

Abstract and Keywords

1 Understanding Crisis Leadership

Subscriber: Universita di Bologna; date: 10 September 2020

In comparative politics studies of political development, elite statecraft during crises

Subscriber: Universita di Bologna; date: 10 September 2020

In structural-functionalist accounts, a crisis is most often defined as an urgent threat to

Subscriber: Universita di Bologna; date: 10 September 2020

As noted, crisis analysis has developed as a broad epistemological and methodological

3 Dissecting Crisis Leadership

Subscriber: Universita di Bologna; date: 10 September 2020

Following Selznick’s (1957) work on institutional leadership, we conceptualize crisis lead­

1. Sense-making. Political leaders are expected to make authoritative interpretations

Subscriber: Universita di Bologna; date: 10 September 2020

Making Sense of Crisis

Sense-making refers to the capacity of leaders to recognize that an urgent threat is

Scholars of foreign policy crises and international conflict management, in particular,

Subscriber: Universita di Bologna; date: 10 September 2020

Subscriber: Universita di Bologna; date: 10 September 2020

Vertical coordination pertains to the orchestration of activities between subordinate

An example of effective horizontal coordination is found in President George Bush

Subscriber: Universita di Bologna; date: 10 September 2020

Crisis communication is thus an important element of political leadership. Political lead­

Subscriber: Universita di Bologna; date: 10 September 2020

(p. 428) Learning

Subscriber: Universita di Bologna; date: 10 September 2020

4 An Agenda for Crisis Leadership Studies

Subscriber: Universita di Bologna; date: 10 September 2020

Janis, I. (1982). Groupthink. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.

Barton, A. H. (1969). Communities in Disaster. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

Bell, C. (1971). The Conventions of Crisis: A Study in Diplomatic Management. Oxford:

Birkland, T. A. (2006). Lessons of Disaster: Policy Change after Catastrophic Events.

Subscriber: Universita di Bologna; date: 10 September 2020

Bovens, M. A. P. and ’t Hart, P. (1996). Understanding Policy Fiascoes. Piscataway, NJ:

Bracher, K. D. (1971). The German Dictatorship. London: Methuen.

Brändström, A. and Kuipers, S. L. (2003). ‘From “Normal Incidents” to Political Crises:

Bush, G. W. (2010). Decision Points. New York: Random House.

Subscriber: Universita di Bologna; date: 10 September 2020

Dyson, S. P. (2009). The Blair Identity. Manchester: Manchester University Press

Flin, R. (1996). Sitting in the Hot Seat. London: Wiley.

Furedi, F. (2005). Politics of Fear. London: Continuum.

Hay, C. (2002). Political Analysis. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Hermann, C. F. (1972). International Crises: Insights from Behavioral Research. New

Holsti, O. R. (1972). Crisis, Escalation and War. Montreal: McGill-Queens University

Subscriber: Universita di Bologna; date: 10 September 2020

Janis, I. L. (1972). Victims of Groupthink. Boston, MA: Houghton, Mifflin.

Janis, I. L. (1989). Crucial Decisions. New York: Free Press.

Jervis, R. (1976). Perception and Misperception in International Politics. Princeton, NJ:

Kuipers, S. and ’t Hart, P. (forthcoming). ‘Crisis and Accountability’, in M. Bovens, R. E.

Linz, J. J. and Stepan, A. (1978). Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation:

Linz, J. J. and Stepan, A. (1996). Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation.

Subscriber: Universita di Bologna; date: 10 September 2020

McConnell, A. (2011). ‘Success? Failure? Something In-between? A Framework for Evalu­

Nixon, R. (1962). Six Crises. New York: Touchstone.

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). (2003). Emerging

Paige, G. D. (1968). The Korean Decision. New York: Free Press.

Quarantelli, E. L. (1988). ‘Crisis Management: A Summary of Research Findings’, Journal

Rosenthal, U. and ’t Hart, P. (1991). ‘Experts and Decision-makers in Crisis Situations’,

Schafer, M. and Crichlow, S. (2010). Groupthink Versus High-quality Decision Making in

Selznick, P. (1957). Leadership in Administration. Berkeley, CA: University of California

Subscriber: Universita di Bologna; date: 10 September 2020

Following Selznick’s (1957) work on institutional leadership, we conceptualize crisis lead

Crisis communication is thus an important element of political leadership. Political lead

McConnell, A. (2011). ‘Success? Failure? Something In-between? A Framework for Evalu