Overall, these findings indicate that economic crises take a number of different
forms, and scholars should appreciate their distinct political correlates. Similarly, it is
important to recognize that crisis depth and duration are analytically distinct
concepts, and the political factors that cause severe crises are not always the same as
those that prolong them. Theoretical explanations need to take these subtleties into
account. Indeed, our results suggest that existing theories of the political conditions
that enable states to implement market reforms and avert or escape from economic
crises are in need of revision. Many widely hypothesized factors are insignificant or
inconsistent determinants of crisis proclivity, while other variables behave in a
contra-theorized manner. In particular, the finding that party system fractionalization
decreases the incidence and duration of crises indicates that a factor often assumed to
exacerbate crises may instead prevent policy volatility. More generally, party system
and institutional variables alone provide less explanatory leverage than the nature of
distributional conflicts and their degree of organization in the political sphere