The political sociology of crisis – political sociology in times of crisis

Sociology has evolved and developed as a “crisis science”. In times of crisis, political sociologists are frequently inquired to understand the structural mechanisms and dysfunctionalities that led to the crisis as well as to process the social and political consequences. Moreover, the cascade of crises since 2007 – including the world economic crisis, the Euro crisis, the political crisis over migration, the covid pandemic and the crisis of the political world order and the global economic system after the Russian invasion of Ukraine – are accompanied by the claim of the crisis of liberal democracy. Here, political sociology is asked to take over from economics, virology, international relations and other disciplines as the public and (sometimes) political elites seek analyses and answers for what these crises mean for societies, the institutions, convictions, and behaviors of people taken for granted in normal times. And at latest from this point on, a critical political sociology needs to reflect on what is taken for granted in so-called normal times, how democratic these political systems are, and how crises as well as their consequences are related to power and inequalities. In this paper, we bring together and discuss various conceptual perspectives for a political sociology of crisis in times of crises. One such perspective understands crisis fundamentally as a genuinely political category. Crises are politicized and politically instrumentalized by different forces and actors with different interests with regards to crisis diagnosis and crisis management strategies. Hence, crises always refer to a struggle for hegemony. Another perspective, which one could call the discrepancy-approach, aims to understand political crises as symptoms of a gap between democratic ideals, self-understanding or legitimation narratives applied by modern societies and their real-existing political practices. From this angle, a social constellation appears as a crisis, if the material conditions and practices constituting it deviate from a certain understanding of democracy – such as the Euro-crisis deriving from an erosion of the legitimacy of nationally elected parliaments over their central banks.