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In 1986, the American researcher Peter Gurevich published the monograph Politics in Hard Times: Comparative Responses to International Economic Crises, which analyzes the influence of political factors on the economic course chosen by various states during the international economic crises of 1873, 1929, and the 1970s. This book became the "starting point" for numerous subsequent studies in the field of comparative political economy, designed to answer the question of why some countries cope with exogenous (external) shocks and the resulting crises more successfully than others. While for governments and citizens such shocks create a huge number of new problems for which they are not always ready to solve, for researchers, exogenous shocks and responses to them open up new opportunities for scientific analysis. Indeed, unlike a number of other disciplines, political science is relatively rarely faced with natural experiments that make it possible to identify the causes and mechanisms of changes in the behavior of states and individuals in a comparative perspective. Meanwhile, it is they who act as a kind of "crash tests" that allow to identify various vulnerabilities of political regimes, public administration systems, mechanisms of political support, as well as the dynamics of political preferences of individuals. In “normal” times, as opposed to “difficult,” it is not so easy to analyze these vulnerabilities and preference dynamics: when considering them, too many probable factors must be included in the analysis, which complicates matters and sometimes does not allow specialists to come to certain conclusions. This is why the study of the political consequences of external shocks has become a popular topic among political scientists in recent decades. This issue of Political Science is intended to contribute to the study of this topic.