“Regime” is one of the most used but least discussed concepts in Comparative Politics. The global rise of authoritarianism has triggered a boom in studies of how political regimes transform and collapse, making the study of regimes increasingly necessary. Yet, scholars and analysts rarely stop to ask, what is a regime? This workshop seeks contributions that move beyond the notion that political regimes are self-contained, internally homogeneous, and functionally equivalent units. It will bring together critical, interdisciplinary perspectives on regimes that privilege multi-scalarity, historical sensitivity and questions of policy. The outcome of the workshop will be an edited volume.
University of Pavia, co-director Gianni Del Panta’s institution, will be a full ECPR member institution from 1/10/2024.
A systematic interrogation of the concept ‘regime’, both of how it is currently used and of how it might better reflect changing political realities, is long overdue. Many of today’s regime-defining phenomena (colonialism and decolonization, capitalist and technological transformations, climate breakdown and migration) operate at multiple scales, while our geographical imagination remains wedded to the colour-coded countries map as the visual representation of regimes and their transformation.
The last explicit scholarly engagement with the concept ‘regime’ was conducted 30 years ago by Gerardo Munck (1996); in the meantime, regime’s neighbouring concepts, ‘state’ and ‘governance’ have seen substantial theoretical development. Abundant research has documented how the growth of increasingly complex state bureaucracies and organized interest groups fundamentally reshaped the political game (Hacker and Pierson 2014) and how, since the mid-1970s, the structure and practices of states have transformed alongside globalization and financialization (Hameiri and Jones 2016; Innes 2023). There is an equally well-documented change in the daily practice of governing. Not only the structures through which a regime governs (the state) but also how it governs have transformed: governance and its outcomes are increasingly shaped by institutions and actors that operate at transnational and subnational levels (Cerny 1997; Castells 2005; Bellamy and Palumbo 2010).
This workshop will thoroughly reappraise the concept of regime, bringing it in line with the financialized, multi-scalar, technology-driven processes that characterize the political world of the 21st Century.
Bellamy, Richard and Antonino Palumbo, eds. 2010 From Government to Governance. Abingdon: Routledge.
Castells, Manuel. 2005. “Global Governance and Global Politics.” PS: Political Science & Politics 38(1): 9-16.
Cerny, Philip G. 1997. “Paradoxes of the Competition State: The Dynamics of Political Globalization.” Government and Opposition 32(2): 251-274.
Hacker, Jacob and Paul Pierson. 2014. “After the ‘Master Theory’: Downs, Schattschneider, and the Rebirth of Policy-Focused Analysis.” Perspectives on Politics 12(3): 643-662.
Hameiri, Shahar and Lee Jones. 2016. “Global Governance as State Transformation.” Political Studies 64(4): 793–810.
Innes, Abby. 2023. Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Munck, Gerardo L. 1996. “Disaggregating Political Regime: Conceptual Issues in the Study of Democratization.” Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies Working Paper no. 228.
1: How does the ways in which the term ‘regime’ is used shape our understanding of regime stability and change?
2: How do transformations in the state and in governance impact regimes, both conceptually and empirically?
3: How can we re-think 'regime' to better account for the multi-scalar processes that shape politics in the 21st Century?
4: Might a different conception of ‘regime’ help us rethink regime dynamics beyond the democracy-autocracy dichotomy?
5: How can we account for the coexistence of multiple temporalities in the evolution of regimes over time?
1: Conceptual histories of 'regime'
2: Studies of 'regime' from the perspective of International Political Economy
3: Studies of the relationship between regimes and imperialism, colonialism and empire
4: Studies of how the climate emergency shape regimes, and/or how regimes are impacted by the climate emergency
5: Studies that explore political regimes through the lens of governance and public policy
6: Studies of ‘regime’ and ‘regime transformation’ that challenge neat democracy-autocracy dichotomies
7: Studies that challenge the linear temporality of regime transformation
8: Studies challenging homogenous understandings of regime from a gender, class, race, or other critical perspective
