Democracy is the First Casualty of the Crisis: Legitimacy and Economic Policy-Making during the financial market crisis 2008-2013

Severe economic and financial market crises exacerbate collective action problems and thus trigger challenges to legitimacy in democracies. The article presents a typology of decision-making modes in economic policy-making in normal times and crisis times. It shows that problems of time-inconsistency in combination with high uncertainty over re-distributive implications lead to an 'ad-hoc-technocratization' of economic policy-making. The separation of decision-taking from input-based legitimacy-procedures is relevant for scholars of democracy because the redistributive implications of crisis policies are high. The 'democratic deficit' of crisis policies is thus not a symptom of 'Post-Democracy' but of the specific context arising in an economic crisis. Adapted from the source document.