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The interaction between crisis situations and political leadership has long been an eminent topic in political science. However, political leaders are often seen as merely reacting to exogenous challenges (such as natural catastrophes, economic crises, terrorist attacks). In contrast to these structure-oriented approaches, the present paper emphasizes the role of political agency in shaping or deliberatively creating crisis situations. It is done through setting up a typology based on the differentiation among various forms of contingency. In the second half of the article, the usefulness of this typology is illustrated by analyzing empirical examples, focusing primarily on cases where political leadership truly made a difference in a crisis situation.