Innovation in Regime Studies: New Approaches to Understanding Contemporary Political Regimes

Political regime studies are witnessing a crucial moment in their history. The first quarter of the 21st century has been a period of major transformations regarding how political power is organized, legitimized, and contested worldwide. The emergence of competitive authoritarian regimes, autocratization in both old and new democracies, the durability and evolution of authoritarian regimes, and the emergence of new forms of digital authoritarianism, have all together posed a challenge to the existing analytical frameworks. In addition, recent developments in methods—from computational text analysis to social network analysis, from qualitative comparative analysis to machine learning techniques—and the availability of new cross-country datasets have provided researchers with opportunities to revisit and confront traditional questions with new empirical strategies (e.g. Coppedge et al 2022; Gerschewski 2023; Lott 2024). Equally, a wave of new ethnographic, practice-based, and site-based approaches is challenging traditional approaches to comparison and opening up new questions about authoritarianism, democracy, and dynamics of regime transformation (Simmons and Smith 2021; Koch 2022; Glasius 2023). Growing attention to both sub-national and transnational actors and processes (Cooley & Heathershaw 2019; Giraudy et al 2019; Gurol et al 2023; McEwen and Towns 2025; Tomini et al 2025) is also pushing regime scholars to reconsider the field and pose new questions on how regimes function and transform (Cianetti et al 2025). The goal of this Section is to offer a space for collective reflection on how political science can better study regimes by connecting recent academic discussions with real-life developments. We are looking for panels that will stretch the boundaries of regime studies in theoretical, conceptual, methodological, and empirical ways at the same time. This section welcomes panels that engage with the issues mentioned above. We particularly encourage contributions that: construct new theoretical paradigms for regime changes and dynamics; put to the test improved concepts for better representation of modern regime characteristics; make use of state-of-the-art approaches and techniques in the analysis of regime emergence, resilience, and transition; draw on fresh sources of data or new empirical methods; widen the scope of regime politics exploration, including by intersecting it with other fields of study into e.g. gender, race, empire, and capitalist transformations; inquire into key actors within political regimes; and look at the overlapping of regime type with crucial present-day issues such as climate change, migration, and technological transformation. Suggested panels: 1. Democratic Backsliding and Resilience: Lessons from Central and Eastern Europe (Chair: Tim Haughton) 2. True Will of the People: Contesting Elections in Democracies (Chair: Pawel Marczewski) 3. Rethinking Regimes (Chairs: Licia Cianetti, Gianni Del Panta and Catherine Owen) 4. Democratic washing: When Democracy Justifies Its Own Erosion (Chair: Nitzan Perelman Becker) 5. The Military and Democratic Backsliding (Chair: Carmen Wintergerst) 6. Regime adaptation vis-à-vis new forms of participation (Chairs: Márton Gerő and Valeria Resta) 7. Elite conflicts and regime trajectories (Chair: Adrian Del Rio) 8. Transnational Autocracy Promotion Networks: Mapping the Infrastructure of Authoritarian Diffusion (Chairs: Semuhi Sinanoglu and Julia Leininger) 9. Innovative methods for measuring Democratic Erosion (Chair: Semuhi Sinanoglu) Other themes that can be explored in panels and paper contributions. We particularly (but not exclusively) invite further panels and papers on the following and related themes: • Rethinking regime typologies and approaches to studying regimes: conceptual innovation in regime studies • Autocratization and its resistance: exploring the diversity of resistance forms • Methodological innovation in regime studies: new approaches to measurement, causality, and comparison • Local, national and transnational dimensions of regime transformations: beyond methodological nationalism • Autocratic resilience and adaptation: understanding authoritarian durability in the 21st century • Democratization in the 21st century: new challenges and old paradigms? • Key actors (e.g. judiciary, bureaucracy, military) in political regimes and regime transformations