Never waste a good crisis: governing by the crisis through framing

How can policymakers in chronically reform-sclerotic economies leverage crisis framing to fast-track radical policy reforms? Building on crisis-governance scholarship that stresses the constructed nature of threat, urgency, and uncertainty elements of a crisis, and on the burgeoning mechanistic turn in policy-design studies, this article develops an integrative framework that opens the black box between shock and outcome. A theory-building process-tracing design is applied to the February 2001 financial crash in Turkey, a “least-likely” case for governing by the crisis, to explore the lightning-fast enactment of an independent central banking regime. Using original and published elite interviews, press coverage, and programming and legislative records, the study traces how the crash functioned as an activator that unleashed a cascade of first-order crisis framing mechanisms operating simultaneously: recognition of crisis as disruption, justification of urgent action, and endogenization of causes. These mutually reinforcing mechanisms helped forge a rare consensus, compressed decision time, and delivered a radical reform in just a matter of weeks. The findings advance the state of the art by unpacking how acceleration hinges on the strategic exploitation of framing mechanisms. The article concludes that the proposed mechanistic lens generates hypotheses about when and how crises may be constructed so as to produce transformational policy change.