Crises create windows in which policies unacceptable in normal times can be enacted before opposition organises.
Klein's 2007 argument, contested as a general causal claim. The narrower observation about crisis policy windows overlaps Kingdon's multiple streams and Higgs's ratchet, both from other traditions.
In practice
- A reform that failed three times in committee passes in a fortnight after a flood, attached to the emergency funding bill.
- A regulator granted temporary powers during a banking crisis still holds them a decade later, and nobody ever proposed the extension as such.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation is the policy window: proposals wait in readiness until a crisis lets them be attached to an urgent problem. Another is procedural, since emergency powers suspend the consultation that would otherwise slow a measure.
- In its favour
- Crisis-time changes that would not have passed in normal conditions are documented, and the ratchet in state power after emergencies has been measured.
- Against it
- As a general causal claim it is contested: crises have also produced expansions of welfare and regulation, and the case selection has been criticised, particularly the reading of Chile.
- Standing
- Contested as a general causal claim; the narrower observation about crisis policy windows overlaps Kingdon and Higgs.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- Competing accounts of how power works