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Populist governance is commonly analyzed through national elections, party competition, leadership, and institutional erosion. Its durability, however, may depend on political processes that cross territorial levels. Governments can convert migration bargains, foreign-policy confrontations, supranational disputes, and transnational alliances into domestic legitimacy and material leverage. At the same time, executive centralization reshapes the room for maneuver available to cities, regions, courts, bureaucracies, and civil-society actors, which may resist, accommodate, or selectively implement national projects. These processes are often studied separately, obscuring the causal links among international strategy, national power concentration, and subnational politics.
This panel introduces the “vertical politics of populist governance” as a framework for tracing how resources, authority, narratives, and constraints travel across supranational, national, and subnational arenas. Its central question is: under what conditions do cross-level interactions reinforce authoritarian consolidation, and when do they generate institutional friction, policy innovation, or democratic resilience? It does not presume that populism produces a uniform authoritarian outcome; variation is the phenomenon to be explained.
The panel invites papers that examine one or more of three connected mechanisms: (1) external leverage, through which populist governments use diplomacy, migration governance, international crises, or supranational institutions for domestic legitimation and bargaining power; (2) executive centralization, including the restructuring of institutions, policy authority, and implementation; and (3) subnational contestation, encompassing resistance, adaptation, selective compliance, and alternative governance by local or regional actors. Contributions should make the connection between at least two levels explicit rather than treating them as parallel contexts.
Relevant empirical domains include migration, social policy, crisis governance, digital control, and relations with regional or international organizations. The panel welcomes comparative and theory-building studies as well as analytically leveraged single cases, using qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods. It especially encourages dialogue across Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and other Global South and Global North settings. Paper selection will seek regional, gender, and career-stage balance.
By connecting comparative politics, international relations, and multilevel governance, the panel seeks to explain not simply where populism succeeds, but how cross-level power relations produce divergent trajectories of authoritarian durability and democratic response.