RC17 - Comparative Public Opinion

Call for Papers: Webinar on Mass Attitudes in an Era of Democratic Backsliding

Tentative date: a weekday in mid-November 2026, 12:00 - 15:00 UTC

The exact date and time will be finalized in consultation with accepted authors.

IPSA RC17 (Comparative Public Opinion) invites paper proposals for a webinar on public opinion and democratic backsliding.

Research on the demand side of democratic backsliding is growing quickly, and the open questions are moving with it. Do citizens recognize backsliding as it happens, or only in retrospect? Does stated support for democracy predict anything about political behavior? What happens to public opinion after backsliding stops, during attempted restoration? And how far does the measured global decline depend on judgments that are themselves contested?

This literature remains concentrated on a small set of high-profile cases. We are particularly keen to receive work on democracies outside the United States and Western Europe, including incumbent-led erosion in countries that attract little scholarly attention, and we intend the panel to be comparative in composition as well as in method.

We welcome papers on topics including, but not limited to:

• Citizen detection of, and tolerance for, democratic violations, and the gap between stated democratic commitments and political behavior

• Partisanship, polarization, and trade-offs between democratic principles and partisan or policy gains

• Public opinion during democratic restoration, recovery, and resilience

• Elite cues, media systems, and information environments, including AI-generated content

• Measuring support for democracy: conceptualization, cross-national comparability, and survey evidence bearing on contested accounts of global decline

Both completed papers and work in progress are welcome. We aim to select 2 to 4 papers to allow substantial discussion, and an RC17 board member will serve as discussant.

Format

Each paper receives a full hour: a 20-minute presentation, 10 minutes of discussant comments, and 30 minutes of open discussion. If we accept four papers, we may split the webinar across two sessions on separate dates to keep each session manageable across time zones.

For reference, 12:00 UTC in mid-November corresponds to 06:00 in Mexico City, 07:00 in New York, 09:00 in São Paulo and Santiago, 12:00 in London and Accra, 13:00 in Berlin and Lagos, 14:00 in Johannesburg, 17:30 in New Delhi, 20:00 in Singapore and Taipei, 21:00 in Seoul and Tokyo, and 23:00 in Sydney.

How to submit

Please provide your paper title and abstract (max. 250 words), author names, affiliations, and contact details; whether the paper is completed or in progress; and your IPSA membership status or affiliated national/regional association. Submit through our Google Form.

Proposal deadline: 30 September 2026

Notification of acceptance: 15 October 2026

Accepted authors should circulate a draft paper to participants at least one week before the webinar.

Eligibility

Open to all researchers. Priority will be given to IPSA members and members of IPSA-affiliated national and regional political science associations. Early-career researchers are especially encouraged to apply.

Email us for any questions at: rc17.ipsa@gmail.com