In all societies, formal and informal norms regulate political life. Transgressing these norms invites condemnation, yet transgression is also a precondition for democratic change. Over the past two decades, transgression has shifted from a practice historically associated with radical, emancipatory actors to a widely used strategy across the ideological spectrum, exemplified by Donald Trump and Javier Milei. This Workshop builds an interdisciplinary, comparative research agenda on political transgression and its normalization, bringing together scholars of populism, the radical right, democratic theory, political communication and technocapitalism. It builds on a pilot workshop held at Universidad Complutense de Madrid in June 2026.
The rise of transgressive political practices is driven by interacting factors: a succession of crises, from 9/11, the Great Recession of 2008 to the 2015 refugee crisis, COVID-19, and the economic fallout of the war in Ukraine, that have destabilized institutional frameworks and reshaped the criteria of political legitimacy; the growing weight of technocapitalism, whose platforms reward provocation and resist regulation; the erosion of traditional guardians of the public sphere, such as parties, the mainstream press, and cultural and scientific institutions; and a documented crisis of democratic norms, in which the transgression of informal rules by elected leaders is increasingly implicated in democratic backsliding.
Despite the centrality of transgression to debates on populism, the radical right and democratic erosion, political science still lacks a systematic, comparative and interdisciplinary conceptualization of transgression as a political category in its own right, distinct from, though related to, adjacent concepts such as populism, illiberalism or polarization. Existing scholarship tends to examine transgressive leaders as single, national cases, without shared analytical criteria for comparison. This Workshop responds to that gap, building a common conceptual and methodological framework to compare the causes, mechanisms of normalization, and democratic consequences of political transgression across regions and political traditions, and to clarify its relationship to democratic legitimacy and change.
1: What can law, religion, philosophy, sociology and anthropology contribute to defining transgression?
2: How is transgression measured comparatively, and how has the “Trumpist” model travelled elsewhere?
3: How do transgressions of political form differ from, and relate to, transgressions of substance?
4: When does delegitimizing rivals amount to authoritarianism, not legitimate democratic contestation?
5: How do digital platforms and algorithms function as a new regime of transgressive governmentality?
1: Conceptual histories and typologies of political transgression
2: Comparative studies of transgressive leadership (e.g. Trump, Milei, and other cases)
3: Discursive and rhetorical strategies of transgression
4: Platform governance, algorithms and the normalization of transgressive speech
5: Normalization of formerly marginal policy positions (immigration, gender, civil rights)
6: Transgression and processes of democratic backsliding
7: Transgression, technocapitalism and new forms of governmentality
8: Formal versus substantive transgression in political communication
