How do interactions across international, national and subnational arenas shape populist governance? Populist governments may use migration bargains, foreign policy disputes and transnational alliances to strengthen domestic legitimacy and expand their resources. Yet international commitments and institutions can also constrain them. Meanwhile, executive centralization reshapes the authority of local and regional governments, whose responses range from cooperation and selective implementation to resistance and alternative policy initiatives. Courts, bureaucracies, and civil society can also shape how authority is exercised and contested across these arenas.
This panel examines the multilevel politics of populist governance by tracing how resources, authority, narratives and constraints connect these arenas. It asks when these interactions reinforce concentrations of power and when they generate institutional friction, policy innovation or democratic resilience. It treats authoritarian consolidation and democratic responses as outcomes to be explained, without assuming that populism necessarily produces authoritarianism or that subnational opposition necessarily strengthens democracy.
We invite papers addressing one or more of three themes:
1. International strategies and constraints: diplomacy, migration bargaining, supranational institutions and transnational networks, including their connections to domestic legitimation and political authority.
2. Executive centralization: changes in institutions, policy responsibilities, fiscal resources and implementation that reshape relations between national and subnational actors.
3. Subnational contestation and adaptation: how cities, regions, and local actors resist, accommodate, negotiate, or develop alternatives to national agendas, including through international partnerships.
Papers may focus on any one theme. Relevant policy fields include migration, social and family policy, climate, crisis governance and digital control.
The panel welcomes theoretical contributions, comparative research and single-case studies with broader analytical implications, using qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods. We encourage submissions from all world regions and scholars at all career stages.
By bringing comparative politics, international relations and multilevel governance into dialogue, the panel seeks to explain how interactions across levels shape the durability, limits and democratic consequences of populist governance.
