Crises shatter our understanding of the world (’t Hart 1993) and create political space that political actors seek to fill rapidly with efforts at meaning making. They present frames designed to tell stakeholders and the general public of what happened and what needs to be done. Crises, however, generate uncertainties (knowledge deficits, ambiguous and contradictory information) that do not lend themselves easily to quick framing that will protect political credibility and guide policy action (or inaction). During crises, leaders seldom have the luxury of picking ‘the right time’ to offer their accounts, as they normally would. If leaders do not produce credible frames to fill the information and interpretation vacuum triggered by the occurrence of unscheduled events with great speed then others will step in and dominate the discourse.

Crisis-management research has identified various potential leadership pathologies in crises (Boin et al. 2005; Drennan and McConnell 2007). In sense making, for example, leaders can (be led to) misunderstand crucial dimensions of the crisis. Basing their initial public meaning-making efforts on a faulty or incomplete diagnosis of what is going on presents a major risk to leader credibility in a crisis. Despite logic leading us to assume that leaders will initially engage in low-risk framing strategies, they might veer towards high risk through, for example, publicly under-reacting or overreacting. The need to fill a crisis-induced meaning-making vacuum places extraordinary and sometimes unrealistic pressures on leaders, who, like anyone else, are confronted with surprising, bewildering, ambiguous, sometimes contradictory signals and expert opinions. Amid all the pressures of crisis management, they might misjudge the accuracy of their own sense making or the persuasiveness of their meaning making.

The latter can occur when they fail to pay enough attention to the evolution of the context in which their frames are being received, interpreted and challenged. Former Spanish Prime Minister José Maria Aznar fell prey to this in the framing contest that developed in relation to the 2004 Madrid bombings. Coming just before general elections, the attack did not just traumatise the nation, it divided it. Aznar’s quick and emphatic claim that the attacks were perpetrated by the Spanish State’s long-time adversary, the Basque nationalist extremists of ETA, was quickly construed by opposition groups as an opportunistic move to ‘cover up’ the true causes of the attack—namely, ‘payback’ by al-Qaeda for Spanish participation in the US-led war in Iraq. The opposition was very effective in dramatising the force of its counter-frame; and it was helped along by a trickle of information from the police investigations into the attacks, which began to point in the direction of Muslim extremists. Aznar persevered regardless and his party paid the price at an election a few days later (Olmeda 2008). Likewise, George W. Bush’s initial business-as-usual frame with regard to the financial crisis began to crumble politically as the material realities of the crisis unfolded and lent credence to voices much more pessimistic than Bush’s.

Once leaders espouse a particular crisis frame, subsequent events and their interpretation lead almost inevitably to the emergence of counter-frames. Initial crisis frames rarely stand the test of time. In other words, the context changes and a low-risk frame becomes high risk unless action is taken. This presents leaders with two key challenges: a) to know when the context is changing, and b) to know when the context has altered sufficiently that a new frame really is needed. There is a danger of holding on tightly to an outmoded frame when events and counter-frames lead to a serious questioning of the credibility of the author of the original frame. Canadian Prime Minister Harper’s tenacious assertions (type-1 frame) that the crisis was ‘elsewhere’ and would have little effect on Canada were discredited when the country slid into recession and his political authority was severely challenged in Parliament.

I have suggested that political leaders always strive for success in two domains: ‘politics’ and ‘policy’. These are often not necessarily complementary, and in crises the tensions between them can become stark. Framing a crisis in order to ensure political survival or enhance political reputation might jar with a framing strategy designed to shape the future direction of policy. Producing a frame that satisfies both can be difficult. The Irish Government was fairly quick in settling into a crisis-as-threat frame (type-2) with an element of opportunity emerging later (type-3). These frames were better at providing the foundations for the successful achievement of policy reforms (cuts to pensioner medical benefits, public service reforms and a modernisation of the Irish economy) than they were for shoring up political credibility. Political frames and policy frames do not always go hand in hand. Judging how to blend them while striving for political and policy success can put political leaders under immense pressure.