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The erosion of political alignments, alongside cultural and digital transformations and recurring global economic turmoil, has increasingly challenged the performance and functioning of contemporary political systems. While traditional institutions and political actors face growing pressure to respond to these changes, new dynamics such as deglobalization, rising polarization, and illiberalism are emerging and consolidating across different contexts. At the same time, democratic institutions, together with their established governance, accountability, and rule-of-law mechanisms, often appear insufficient to manage the multiple political transformations, conflicts, and crises affecting societies today. Elections, moreover, seem increasingly unable to generate effective representation or clear political mandates. This scenario highlights the need to strengthen and innovate the theoretical and methodological tools of comparative political research in order to better understand the contemporary challenges confronting democracies worldwide.

This track welcomes proposals that enrich and advance our understanding of institutional politics and its main contemporary challenges from a comparative perspective. We invite submissions addressing both longstanding and emerging issues, as well as contributions offering new conceptual, theoretical, methodological, or empirical insights into any subfield of institutions, elections, and comparative politics at transnational, regional, national, and subnational levels. Relevant topics include, but are not limited to, comparisons of political and historical processes (e.g., populism, revolutions, conflicts, nationalism, democratization and autocratization, leadership styles), as well as studies on gender, representation and trust, challenges to academic freedom, political religion, corruption and violence, political ethics, and citizens’ attitudes and behaviour. We also welcome panels and papers examining continuities and transformations across both traditional and emerging dimensions of contemporary politics.