IPSA RC23 Workshop: Elections in Peril

Democracies are in decline. According to Freedom House 2025, the world has seen each year over the past 17 years more countries that witness their democracy score decline rather than increase. While the democratic backsliding that many countries including India, the United States of America or Hungary have witnessed over the past decade is a multifaceted process that includes infringements of various rights and freedom, central to this backsliding is the erosion of electoral integrity, both in real terms and in the perception of citizens. The prime example of the latter phenomenon is the United States where around 30 percent of the population still believes that the 2020 Presidential Elections was stolen from President Trump. For this research workshop and publication project, we call for contributions on the topic “Elections in Peril”.  We are interested in both comparative research designs and country case studies. In particularly, we call for fine-grained analysis which could help answer the following questions:

• Which factors (political, institutional, cultural, etc.) threaten the integrity and fairness of elections?
• Why is there a discrepancy between the perception of the fairness of elections and the real fairness of elections in many countries?
• How much does misinformation both foreign and domestic undermine citizens’ trust in elections?
• How can artificial intelligence both be a danger and a catalyst for trust in elections?
• Who are the types of actors, who want to undermine the fairness of elections and what are their motivations?
• What explains the spread of election related conspiracy theories? 

The Workshop will be held in Wroclaw on 13 October, the day before the start of the IPSA Regional Conference on the Resilience of Democracy in a Polarized World. We invite established and emerging scholars working on elections and related fields to submit extended abstracts of roughly 500 words to the two workshop convenors Theresa Reid (t.reidy@ucc.ie) and Daniel Stockemer (dstockem@uottawa.ca) by 1 June 2026. We plan to invite 15 to 25 scholars to this workshop, which will predate the IPSA regional conference on autocratization.

We will cover coffee and a lunch and offer free registration. We plan to publish some of the papers selected for this workshop in a special issue or edited volume (depending on quality), and by submitting an abstract, authors agree to include their paper in the special issue/ edited book.