What constitutes a crisis?

Crises can be defined as situations that ‘threaten significant harm to a country’s population or basic values and compels a political response under time pressure and uncertainty’ (Lipscy, Reference Lipscy2020: E99). They are important because of their human consequences and their political repercussions. Crises are defined by three elements: threat, urgency, and uncertainty (Hermann, Reference Hermann1963; Boin et al., Reference Boin, Hart, Stern and Sundelius2017). Crises emerge when people believe (correctly or not) that a situation poses a serious threat to core values, structures, or life-sustaining systems, creating a sense that existing routines are inadequate to address the challenge. This threat is compounded by urgency, as decision-makers face intense time pressure to act quickly before the situation deteriorates further, often with limited resources or coordination. At the same time, crises unfold amid high levels of uncertainty, where information is incomplete, ambiguous, or rapidly changing, making it difficult to fully grasp causes, consequences, or appropriate responses.

However, the three defining elements of crises – threat, urgency, and uncertainty – can vary both across different crises and throughout the course of a single crisis. Their intensity and interaction shape not only how a crisis unfolds but also how political actors respond. A major, unprecedented crisis has different effects compared to prolonged or repeated crises, which can become routine and thus have diverse effects. Climate change, for example, represents a significant threat marked by high uncertainty. However, because its most severe consequences are not immediate, policymakers often face less time pressure to act. In contrast, the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic involved an urgent, life-threatening, and rapidly spreading crisis. There was widespread uncertainty about fundamental issues such as the nature of the virus and the effectiveness of response measures. This urgency forced leaders to make rapid decisions through ad hoc mechanisms. In addition, depending on these three characteristics, crises can compel policymakers, political parties, and institutions to engage in behaviors and decisions that would be unthinkable under normal circumstances. For instance, during the COVID-19 pandemic, many governments adopted restrictive measures to contain the spread of the virus that in normal times would never have been considered (Bethke and Wolff, Reference Bethke and Wolff2023).

Beyond immediate policy responses, crises have far-reaching political consequences. Crises influence how voters perceive issues, reshaping public opinion both on the crisis itself and on broader political and social questions (Lutz and Karstens, Reference Lutz and Karstens2021; Van der Brug and Harteveld, Reference Van der Brug and Harteveld2021; Kalatzi Pantera et al., Reference Kalatzi Pantera, Böhmelt and Bakaki2023). At the same time, and particularly relevant for this special issue, crises influence political parties and governments (Mizrahi et al., Reference Mizrahi, Vigoda‐Gadot and Cohen2021). They can create opportunities for political actors to expand authority, reshape agendas, and consolidate support, or they can constrain decision-making, erode trust, and expose weaknesses in governance. Thus, the question that arises is how do crises influence institutional dynamics?

Crises and party dynamics

Crises influence party dynamics through multiple channels that have been widely examined in the comparative politics literature. First, crises can reshape the issue attention of members of parliament. While some crises may lead to greater party responsiveness (Tornafoch-Chirveches, Reference Tornafoch-Chirveches2023), others may not trigger the same effect. Moreover, responsiveness may manifest more clearly in certain parliamentary activities, such as oral questions, while being less visible in others, like written replies.

Second, just as crises can influence responsiveness, they can also affect the relationship between governments and opposition parties. They do so by altering the level of friction between them. On one hand, research shows that during crises, opposition leaders often reduce their criticism of government actions. This can stem from a sense of national unity in challenging times (Mueller, Reference Mueller1970), limited resources to effectively challenge the government (Brody, Reference Brody1991), or strong public support for the government that makes opposition efforts less effective (Bol et al., Reference Bol, Giani, Blais and Loewen2021). On the other hand, other studies find that crises can have the opposite effect, prompting opposition parties to intensify their criticism by questioning and undermining the government’s crisis response (Louwerse et al., Reference Louwerse, Sieberer, Tuttnauer and Andeweg2021; Chiru, Reference Chiru2024).

Third, crises can alter the balance of power between the government and the parliament. In general, crises tend to strengthen the role of the executive. The government takes a center role (Silva et al., Reference Silva, Costa, Moniz, Rodríguez-Teruel, Real-Dato and Verney2024) and is expected to demonstrate leadership during difficult times (Boin and Hart, Reference Boin, Hart, Lodge and Wegrich2012). At the same time, many governments might promote centralization of power that marginalizes lower-levels of decision making (Profeti and Baldi, Reference Profeti and Baldi2021) and puts aside the parliament (Bolleyer and Salát, Reference Bolleyer and Salát2021). However, these actors remain crucial. The parliament is essential for ensuring governmental accountability, while subnational actors might be more equipped to respond to the specific needs of their constituencies. When crises shift the balance of power, governments may centralize decision-making, which can lead to restrictions on fundamental freedoms as a result of exceptional legislative measures adopted by the cabinet.

Despite the growing body of research on crises and their effects on party dynamics, findings remain inconclusive, leaving several important questions unanswered. For instance, do parties respond to voters and other societal actors in the same way across different parliamentary mechanisms during crises? Do opposition parties tend to align with or oppose government policies in times of crisis? Do governments use crises as an opportunity to centralize power and bypass normal checks and balances? The common thread linking these questions is the role of crises in shaping political behavior and institutional dynamics. This suggests that crises can reshape the patterns and behaviors observed during ‘normal times.’ Understanding how different crises affect responsiveness, cooperation, opposition, and centralization is therefore essential for a more nuanced understanding of party dynamics and governance under stress.

The papers included in this special issue address these questions by examining different dimensions of crises in a systematic way. Each contribution focuses on a specific aspect, such as party responsiveness, government-opposition relations, or shifts in institutional power, while collectively providing a comprehensive picture of how crises interact with political processes.

The Italian case

From the perspective of this special issue, the papers shed light on how the competing demands of ideology (see the contributions by Gambacciani et al., and Ieraci and Ripamonti) and institutional responsibility (see the contributions by Cavalieri et al., and Piccolino and De Giorgi; see also, e.g. Ceron et al., Reference Ceron, Scopelliti and Grechanaya2025) collide most visibly when addressing multiple international crises. These papers enhance our understanding of the deeper transformations in how Italian democracy navigates such challenges. The following section illustrates pivotal crises that Italy has faced in the last 35 years.

The content of the special issue

Based on this background, this special issue investigates how acute crises have reshaped the functioning of Italy’s political institutions. While crises are often assumed to trigger a ‘state of exception’ – characterized by centralized executive power and the suspension of ordinary political conflict – the four contributions presented here offer a more nuanced reality. By examining shifts in parliamentary opposition, executive–legislative relations, legislative responsiveness, and intergovernmental power-sharing, these articles reveal that democratic institutions do not simply freeze during emergencies. Instead, they adapt, resist, and filter crisis pressures through existing political fissures and institutional rules.

In the opening contribution, Paolo Gambacciani, Andrea Pedrazzani, and Luca Pinto challenge the universality of the ‘rally around the flag’ hypothesis. Using a novel dataset of legislative amendments from Italy’s 18th Legislature, they test whether opposition parties united behind the government during the COVID-19 emergency. Their analysis uncovers a striking persistence of ‘politics as usual’: despite unified public sentiment at the pandemic’s onset, opposition parties did not lower their weapons but rather intensified obstructionism against the government’s legislative agenda. These findings underscore the resilience of partisan polarization, demonstrating that the ‘emergency’ did not suspend the adversarial dynamics of the parliamentary arena.

Building on this focus on parliamentary dynamics, Gianluca Piccolino and Elisabetta De Giorgi assess the evolving balance of power between the legislature and the executive. While the initial phase of the pandemic resembled the classic ‘hour of the executive,’ with government dominance in decision-making, the authors find that this imbalance was not static. Drawing on emergency legislation data and elite interviews, they show that Parliament gradually recovered its oversight prerogatives over time. They attribute this re-balancing to processes of political and policy learning: as actors gained knowledge and experience in managing the emergency, the legislature was able to reassert its role and constrain unilateral executive power. Their study highlights that executive dominance is not a fixed outcome of crises, but a dynamic variable moderated by institutional adaptation.

Shifting the lens to the link between citizens and institutions, Alice Cavalieri, Alda Kushi, and Federico Russo investigate parliamentary responsiveness across three distinct crises: economic, migration, and health. Challenging the notion that crisis pressures uniformly override institutional constraints, they utilize two decades of data to show that the format of parliamentary questioning dictates the level of responsiveness. They find that ‘institutional frictions’ remain decisive even under pressure: routine written queries and high-profile oral questions follow divergent logics, leading MPs to be selectively responsive depending on the issue and the available channel. Consequently, the extent to which legislators react to public opinion or media signals is not determined solely by the severity of the crisis, but by the specific institutional rules governing the parliamentary venue.

Finally, Giuseppe Ieraci and Gaia Matilde Ripamonti expand the analysis to vertical power dynamics, comparing intergovernmental relations during the 2008–2013 financial crisis and the 2020–2022 pandemic. This comparison allows for a crucial test of the ‘technocracy’ hypothesis, as both crises saw transitions from partisan to technocratic governments (Berlusconi to Monti, and Conte to Draghi). Contrary to the expectation that technocratic leadership inherently centralizes power, they find that the nature of the crisis is the decisive factor. The COVID-19 health emergency prompted a pronounced re-centralization of power, whereas the economic crisis preserved a more balanced intergovernmental relationship. This suggests that the functional imperatives of the policy domain – health vs. finance – shape state–regional dynamics more than the technocratic or political composition of the executive.

Taken together, these studies illustrate that the institutional impact of crises is far from uniform. Each contribution identifies a different mechanism through which emergencies reorder political relationships: some entrench partisan divides or reinforce specific institutional frictions, while others prompt adaptive learning or selective centralization. Overall, the special issue demonstrates that crises do not simply suspend democracy; rather, they subject it to a stress test where the outcome – whether resistance, adaptation, or concentration of power – is contingent on the specific interplay between the nature of the threat and the resilience of existing political institutions.