Identifying Crises. An Approach to the Identification and Assessment of Crises with Relevance to Public Administrations

Fatalities, economic losses and losses of reputation can be expected when governments fail to identify crises in the public policy realm. Despite these serious consequences, there is hardly any practical advice in crisis management literature on how to systematically identify and assess unfolding crises. So far, only little and unconsolidated research has been done in the field. With this dissertation, an attempt has been made to overcome this shortcoming. The dissertation can be divided into three main parts or results: a) An in-depth literature analysis in order to receive an upfront understanding and overview of the dispersed field of crisis identification and assessment, and to identify relevant crisis factors in the field; b) an empirical part with a quantitative analysis (cluster analysis) of 28 Swiss crises and on linkages between crisis factors and cases relevant to the identification and assessment of crises; and c) a conceptual part in which the findings of the literature and the empirical analysis are bound into an analytical model for crisis identification and assessment. The three results were each worked up into one dissertation paper. In order to gain a more practice-oriented perspective, the dissertation further entails a demonstration (case analysis) on how a crisis can be analyzed on the basis of the analytical model and an expert-based usability test focusing on the practical applicability of the analytical model. In sum, the dissertation lays a cornerstone for a clear-cut subfield of crisis management and contributes to systematizing the field of crisis identification and assessment in the public policy realm. It shall serve as a basis for the development of analytical tools that may support governmental crisis managers and decision-makers with the identification of crises