Crises disrupt established patterns of governance and political competition, creating contests over responsibility, blame and legitimacy. Research shows that crises can generate either cross-partisan rally effects or intensified partisan conflict. Yet research on crisis management and public opinion remains weakly connected: we know too little about how crisis characteristics and elite strategies shape citizens’ evaluations, or how pre-existing polarisation feeds back into crisis governance. This workshop develops a framework for European multiparty, multilevel settings, treating polarisation both as an outcome of crisis politics and as a condition shaping blame, compliance, and cooperation. It identifies mechanisms and compares crisis types.
Three gaps motivate the workshop. First, research on crisis management and polarisation remains fragmented. Crisis scholars have examined framing contests, blame avoidance, and crisis exploitation principally from the perspective of elites and institutions (Boin et al., 2009; Hood, 2011), while polarisation research has developed comparative measures of partisan affect (Reiljan, 2020; Wagner, 2021). Studies of COVID-19 show that crisis conditions, elite cues, and partisan animus interact (Druckman et al., 2021; Flores et al., 2022; Galais & Balinhas, 2025). We nevertheless lack a comparative account of when crises generate solidarity rather than hostility, how durable these effects are, and how existing polarisation shapes subsequent crisis governance.
Second, direct evidence concentrates on COVID-19 and the United States. Europe’s euro, refugee, pandemic, energy, cost-of-living, and climate crises provide variation in threat, duration, responsibility, and party-system context. Europe’s multiparty and multilevel governance also permits analysis of how citizens allocate credit and blame across parties, national governments, and EU institutions (Heinkelmann-Wild et al., 2024).
Third, challenger parties and external information actors may exploit crises by contesting official interpretations and amplifying distrust. Yet it remains unclear whether this activates existing partisan hostility or creates new affective divides. Resolving this question is important for understanding electoral change and democratic resilience.
1: When do crises rally citizens, and when do they deepen polarisation?
2: How do elite strategies shape citizens’ blame judgements and partisan affect?
3: How do challenger parties and disinformation actors exploit crises to deepen division?
4: How does pre-existing polarisation constrain effective crisis management?
5: How do overlapping crises reshape polarisation and political conflict over time?
1: Rally and rupture: trust, institutional support and partisan affect across crises
2: Crisis blame and polarisation: responsibility, institutions and partisan attribution
3: Elite crisis communication: consensus, framing, blame and partisan affect
4: Challenger parties: crisis exploitation, electoral competition and polarisation
5: Crisis elections: rewards, punishment and lasting partisan change
6: Polarisation and crisis governance: compliance, cooperation and credibility
7: Multilevel crisis blame: parties, governments, EU institutions and partisan affect
8: Polycrisis and cumulative exposure: rallies, partisan blocs and conflict transfer
