Crises and Crises Outcomes: Towards a New Synthetic Approach

Topics like the legitimacy of a political order, its historical capacity to perform and actual performance, as well as its adaptability and probability of survival have gained the attention of social scientists quite frequently. Only very recently, however, have there been some promising new developments in crises research which have led to a variety of important empirical results. It is the task of this article to integrate several of these more particularistic approaches by constructing a new model that can be applied to comparative crises research. Crisis, or crisis of legitimacy which is the most severe of all forms of crises, serves as both dependent variable and independent variable, affecting the persistence of political systems. In this model – of which two variants are derived – several theoretical relationships are predicted that will have to be tested in broad – scale historically oriented social research going back to the first – still relatively quiet – decade of this century and covering developments thereafter in countries like Scandinavia, Belgium, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, and the United States. In the final section some operational measures are discussed and combined in an operational model that will serve as a guideline in carrying out the type of study described here.