The Year of Elections: 2024 in Comparative Review

The Department of Political Studies Corry Colloquium Speaker Series presents:

The Year of Elections: 2024 in Comparative Review (a panel discussion)

Friday, March 28, 2025 

12:00-1:30 PM

Robert Sutherland Hall | Room 448

Light lunch served

---

The Year of Elections: 2024 in Comparative Review

More than 60 countries that are collectively home to about half of the world’s population held state-wide ‘national’ elections in 2024, making it the biggest year of elections in history—even without taking into account the year’s many other sub-state and supra-state (the European Union) elections. The results are noteworthy in their own right, with about 80% of incumbents in genuinely democratic states losing seats or vote share from the last election, and some of these elections were exceptionally consequential, with the effects of their results already reshaping world politics in fundamental ways.

The purpose of this panel is to assess the year of elections and its significance from a global and comparative perspective, provided by three highly-regarded experts:

• Dr. Laurie Beaudonnet, Associate Professor of Political Science at the Université de Montréal and Scientific Director of the Jean Monnet Centre Montréal, who will speak on 2024 European elections, with a special emphasis on the United Kingdom and France;
• Dr. Sithembile Mbete, Executive Director of The Public Affairs Research Institute (PARI), who will speak on 2024 African elections, with a special emphasis on South Africa; and
• Dr. Sanjay Ruparelia, Associate Professor of Politics and Jarislowsky Democracy Chair at Toronto Metropolitan University, who will speak on 2024 South Asian elections, with a special emphasis on India.

The panel will be moderated by Dr. Elizabeth Goodyear-Grant, Professor of Political Studies here at Queen’s University and one of our own experts on electoral politics. Each panelist will speak for up to 15 minutes, followed by in-depth discussion between the panelists and attendees. We hope that you can join us!

Panelists

Laurie Beaudonnet

Laurie Beaudonnet is Associate Professor of European Politics at the University of Montreal (Department of Political Science) and Director of the Jean Monnet Center Montreal. She held the Jean Monnet EuroScope Chair from 2015 to 2019 and was co-director of RESTEP, an academic network on politicization in the European Union (EU), from 2017 to 2021. Her research focuses on political attitudes, elections and political parties in the European Union, using quantitative and qualitative methods. She is currently working on the dynamics of politicisation of the European issue among citizens and in political parties. Her work on attitudes towards European integration, politicisation, radical left and right has been published in European Union Politics, Journal of Common Market Studies, West European politics, and Party Politics.

Sithembile Mbete

Dr Sithembile Mbete is a political scientist with 15 years of experience working in academia, civil society, and government. She is the Executive Director of the Public Affairs Research Institute (PARI), a research institute focused on building democratic and effective state institutions in South Africa. Sithembile has a DPhil in International Relations from the University of Pretoria (UP) where she was a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political Sciences.

Sithembile’s research interests include global governance (with a focus on the United Nations), global populism, and electoral systems. From 2020 to 2023, she was a research associate of the African Leadership Centre (ALC) at King’s College London. In 2021, she served as a member of South Africa’s Ministerial Advisory Committee on the Electoral System.

Prior to UP, she was a researcher in the secretariat of the National Planning Commission  contributing to the drafting of the National Development Plan in the areas of public service reform, anti-corruption policy and community safety. Sithembile comments  frequently on a range of political issues in South African and international media including the Financial Times, the New York Times, Al Jazeera, BBC World News, CNN, SABC, NewzroomAfrika, Voice of America, and others.

Sanjay Ruparelia

Sanjay Ruparelia is an Associate Professor of Politics at Toronto Metropolitan University, where he holds the Jarislowsky Democracy Chair, and a Senior Fellow of the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada. His main publications include Divided We Govern: coalition politics in modern India; The Indian Ideology (editor), and Understanding India’s New Political Economy (co-editor).

Sanjay serves as a co-chair of Participedia, an international network that studies democratic innovations, and on the editorial boards of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian Politics, Indian Politics and Policy and Pacific Affairs. He co-hosts On the Frontlines of Democracy, a monthly podcast and lecture series, and regularly contributes to the media in Asia and North America. 

Sanjay previously served as a consultant to the United Nations Development Programme (NYC), United Nations Research Institute on Social Development (Geneva) and the Asia Foundation (Kabul), and taught at the New School for Social Research and Columbia University. His research has been supported by the Commonwealth Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, and Social Science and Humanities Research Council as well as Cambridge, Johns Hopkins, Notre Dame, Princeton, Stellenbosch and Yale. Sanjay earned a B.A. in Political Science from McGill, and a M.Phil in Sociology and Politics of Development and Ph.D. in Politics from Cambridge.

Moderator: Elizabeth Goodyear-Grant

Elizabeth Goodyear-Grant (Ph.D. McGill) is a Professor in the Department of Political Studies at Queen’s University, and the Director of the Canadian Opinion Research Archive (CORA). Her research focuses on Canadian politics, with particular interests in electoral politics, voting behaviour, and public opinion; news media; the political representation of women; and the conceptualization and measurement of sex and gender. She is the author of Gendered News: Media Coverage and Electoral Politics in Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2013), which won the 2016 Pierre Savard Award from the International Council of Canadian Studies, and was one of three books shortlisted for the Canadian Political Science Association’s 2014 Donald Smiley Prize.