Time, Space and Policy in the Study of Political Regimes

Time, space and policy shape how actually-existing regimes work and transform, and yet they have rarely been central to the way we tell the story of regimes and regime change. This paper, which constitutes the introduction to an edited volume on “Rethinking Regimes”, sets out to explain why we need to historicise, spatialise and expand our understanding of regimes to account for their contemporary transformations. As the “regime studies” subfield of political science, now devoted to investigating autocratisation, democratic backsliding, and democratic resilience (Croissant and Tomini 2024; Bunce et al 2025), is booming, its narrow default understanding of regimes is coming under increased criticism (Cianetti, Del Panta and Owen 2025). In the paper we discuss how comparative regime studies has tended to use a linear approach to time which risks de-historicising political processes and overly fixating on elections as the primal triggers of change; how it tends to work with a flat geography that implicitly assumes the equivalence, internal homogeneity and state-boundedness of country-units, in ways that hide and misinterpret political processes that shape regimes above, below and beyond the state (Glasius 2023); and how it tends to treat policy as a second-order question that derives from regime type, obfuscating governance processes that fundamentally shape how regimes work, in the interest of whom, and their chances for resilience or change. We argue that this is the moment to open up the often used but rarely analysed concept of “regime”, take stock of what might have fallen out of our field of vision, and rethink regimes in ways that allow us to better account for the complexities of contemporary politics. And we set out the agenda that will allow regime scholars to do so, engaging with the complexities of time, space and policy for a fuller understanding of political regimes.