'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 inter-scalarity, historical sensitivity and questions of policy. The outcome of the Workshop will be an edited volume.
This Workshop builds on the proponents’ recent systematic review of the concept ‘regime’ (Cianetti, Del Panta and Owen 2025) and aims to push scholars to share and discuss new ways of studying regimes and regime change that overcome the limits identified in that review, and to better reflect changing political realities. While our geographical imagination remains wedded to the colour-coded countries map as the visual representation of regime dynamics, many of today’s regime-defining phenomena (colonialism and decolonisation, capitalist and technological transformations, climate breakdown, migration) are not state-bound, operate at multiple, intersecting scales, and move along non-linear timelines. To push regime studies to better account for this complexity, participants are invited to propose new ways to think of the time and geography of regime transformations, and how these relate to what regimes do in practice (governance).
While regime scholarship is taking the first steps in this direction, regime’s neighbouring concepts, ‘state’ and ‘governance’, have seen substantial theoretical development in recent decades. Abundant research has documented how the growth of increasingly complex state bureaucracies and interest groups have fundamentally reshaped the political game (Hacker and Pierson 2014) and how, since the mid-1970s, the structure and governance of states are increasingly shaped by institutions and actors that operate at transnational and subnational scales (Cerny 1997; Castells 2005; Bellamy and Palumbo 2010). This Workshop will thoroughly reappraise the concept of regime, bringing it in line with the financialised, inter-scalar, technology-driven processes that characterise the political world of the twenty-first 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.
Cianetti, L., Del Panta, G., & Owen, C. (2025). What is a “regime”? Three definitions and their implications for the future of regime studies. Democratization, 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2025.2483418
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.
1: How can we better account for multiple temporalities in scholarly narratives of regime transformation?
2: How do transformations in the state and in governance impact on regimes, conceptually and empirically?
3: How might we rethink 'regime' to better account for the inter-scalar processes in twenty-first century politics?
4: Might a different conception of ‘regime’ help us rethink regime dynamics beyond the democracy-autocracy dichotomy?
5: How do the ways in which the term ‘regime’ is used shape our understanding of regime stability and change?
1: Conceptual histories of ‘regime’
2: Studies of ‘regime’ from international political economy perspectives
3: Studies of ‘regime’ and imperialism
4: Studies of ‘regime’ and the climate emergency
5: Studies that explore 'regime' through the lens of governance and public policy
6: Studies that challenge the linear temporality of regime transformation
7: Studies of ‘regime’ and ‘regime transformation’ that challenge neat democracy-autocracy dichotomies
8: Studies challenging homogenous understandings of regime from a gender, class, race, or other critical perspective
