change that implied a stronger embedment of demographic processes into social sciences dynamics. After a first phase with a focus on the occurrence and timing of demographic events studied separately from each other with a hypothetico-deductive approach, from the early 2000s the need to consider the structure of the life courses and to make justice to its complexity led to a growing use of sequence analysis with the aim of pursuing a holistic approach. At an inter-individual level, pairwise dissimilarities and clustering appeared as the appropriate tools for revealing the heterogeneity in human development. For example, the meta-narrations contrasting individualized Western societies with collectivist societies in the South (especially in Asia) were challenged by comparative studies revealing the diversity of pathways to legitimate reproduction. At an intra-individual level, sequence analysis integrates the basic life course principle that individuals interpret and make decision about their life according to their past experiences and their perception of contingencies. The interest for this perspective was also promoted by the changes in individuals' life courses for cohorts born between the beginning and the end of the 20th century. These changes have been described as de-standardization, de-synchronization, de-institutionalization. Among the drivers of these dynamics, the transition to adulthood is key: for more recent birth cohorts this crucial phase along individual life courses implied a larger number of events and lengths of the state spells experienced. For example, many postponed leaving parental home and the transition to parenthood, in some context cohabitation replaced marriage as long-lasting living arrangement, and the birth of the first child occurs more frequently while parents cohabit instead of within a wedlock. Such complexity required to be measured to be able to compare quantitative indicators across birth cohorts (see for an extension of this questioning to populations from low- and medium income countries). The demography's old ambition to develop a 'family demography' has found in the sequence analysis a powerful tool to address research questions at the cross-road with other disciplines: for example, multichannel techniques represent precious opportunities to deal with the issue of compatibility between working and family lives. Similarly, more recent combinations of sequence analysis and event history analysis have been developed (see for a review) and can be applied, for instance, for understanding of the link between demographic transitions and health. Political sciences The analysis of temporal processes in the domain of political sciences regards how institutions, that is, systems