Severe economic and financial market crises exacerbate collective action problems and thus trigger challenges to legitimacy in democracies. The article presents a typology of decision-making modes in economic policy-making in normal times and crisis times. It shows that problems of time-inconsistency in combination with high uncertainty over re-distributive implications lead to an “ad-hoc-technocratization” of economic policy-making. The separation of decision-taking from input-based legitimacy-procedures is relevant for scholars of democracy because the redistributive implications of crisis policies are high. The “democratic deficit” of crisis policies is thus not a symptom of “Post-Democracy” but of the specific context arising in an economic crisis.