Governments consistently deal with crises, but some are larger than others, some are endogenously created, and some are exogenously imposed. This article introduces a Special Issue of the Journal in which 14 sets of contributors assess various elements of policymaking in times of crisis. We divide the contributions into those assessing public opinion responsiveness, institutional design and response, and identity-politics. As crises appear to be increasingly common, we assess their impacts on the policy process, concluding that no understanding of policymaking in general can be complete if it does not apply to policymaking in times of crisis.
Baumgartner et al. (2025) studied this question.