Contemporary democracies are increasingly characterised by uncertainty surrounding institutional authority, political norms, enforcement, and the boundaries of legitimate political conduct. Yet harmful political grievances do not become consequential through mobilisation or circulation alone. Their political effects depend partly on how institutions respond: whether they constrain, legitimise, tolerate, amplify, selectively enforce, or fail to sanction them.
This panel examines institutional authorisation, understood as actions or inactions by authoritative actors that materially alter the legitimacy, perceived cost, or practical enforceability of political claims and behaviours. It asks how parties, legislatures, courts, regulators, law-enforcement bodies, media systems, digital platforms, and other norm-setting institutions mediate the transition from contested grievance to politically permissible or enforceable forms of exclusion, coercion, discrimination, and violence.
Institutional authorisation need not involve explicit endorsement. It may operate through strategic silence, procedural delay, selective enforcement, regulatory ambiguity, non-intervention, amplification, or the gradual normalisation of previously marginal claims. Institutions may also interrupt these processes by reasserting democratic norms, imposing sanctions, protecting targeted groups, or limiting opportunities for escalation.
The panel welcomes comparative, conceptual, and empirically grounded research examining these meso-level mechanisms across different democratic contexts. Contributions may address gendered, racialised, religious, nationalist, populist, or other forms of political grievance, as well as interactions between digital mobilisation and formal institutions.
By moving beyond explanations centred solely on ideology, discourse, or individual attitudes, the panel asks a broader question central to uncertain democracies: through what institutional mechanisms do some political grievances become constrained while others acquire legitimacy, reduced sanctions, or practical capacity for enforcement?
