Over the past decade, democracies in Europe and beyond have faced several crises, creating a complex tapestry of challenges demanding rapid yet deliberative policy responses. This paper investigates how parliamentary legislative activity adapts to crises characterized by high uncertainty and urgency. We argue that legislators face trade-offs between legislative efficiency and deliberative quality (Hoppe, 2011; Parkinson, 2018), and that these trade-offs evolve strategically throughout crises. Conceptualizing crises along two key dimensions — intensity and duration — we hypothesize that these dimensions moderate legislators’ trade-off considerations. Specifically, early stages of a crisis favor swift and efficient responses, whereas later stages facilitate a shift toward more deliberative processes as urgency subsides and policy scrutiny increases. We test these claims using the ParlLawSpeech corpus, which links 190,000 parliamentary speeches with 14,000 legislative proposals and 11,000 adopted laws in Germany (2009–2021) and 200,000 speeches with 6,000 proposals and 3,000 laws in Austria (1996–2020). The prevalence of crises is estimated through domain-specific shifts in emergency emphasis within parliamentary debates, employing a latent semantic scaling model (Rauh, 2022). We analyze how these shifts influence legislative activity, focusing on the duration of legislative processes (indicating efficiency), the deliberative quality of debates (Behrendt et al., 2024) and the extent to which bills are amended before becoming laws (indicating deliberation). Our findings will offer important insights into how crises shape legislative behavior, highlighting the conditions under which efficiency is prioritized over deliberation, and illustrating the dynamic nature of crisis governance in national parliamentary settings.