The deeply rooted belief in the importance of public leadership is accompanied by quick and often shallow assessments of leadership performance. Such assessments never arrive more quickly than in the wake of crises and disasters-these episodes make for instant winners (Giuliani) and losers (Bush). These assessments are necessarily shallow, as the public can only judge leaders by what they see. While symbolic performance is important (if only because it can arouse the public), it is not the only performance dimension by which we should assess crisis leadership. In this article, we reflect on the many tasks that strategic leaders are called to perform, and we offer a comprehensive framework for leadership performance in times of crisis.

This article aims to enhance understanding of selective politicization processes in policy failures and examine the attempts of policy-makers to use framing strategies to allocate blame. The policy response to alleged submarine intrusions in Sweden and Dutch military involvement in the fall of Srebrenica are the two case-studies used in this article. These cases will be analysed using three perspectives derived from the literature on framing: depicting events as violations of core public values; depicting events as operational incidents or as symptoms of endemic problems; allocating accountability and blame for the occurrence and/or ‘mismanagement’ of crisis. Finally, we present a conceptual framework of the different shapes that political blaming can take when certain framing strategies are adopted.

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This article discusses the politics of policy evaluation and approaches this in two ways, each with its own shortcomings and crucial strengths. The first approach looks at the roles and functions of policy evaluation and puts them in the wider politics of public policy making. The second looks at how the key schools of policy analysis propose to deal with the contested and inherently political nature of evaluation. The article ends with an original view of how policy analysis may cope with the challenge of ex post evaluation.