Ongoing struggles over core principles of democratic governance
The regime question-often boiled down to "democracy or autocracy?"-has been central to democratic politics from the start. This has entailed not only fights over the extent of the franchise but also, crucially, ongoing struggles over core principles of democracy, the "rules of the game." In this timely study, Amel Ahmed examines the origins and development of the regime question in Western democracies and considers the implications for regime contention today. She argues that battles over the regime question were so foundational and so enduring that they constitute a dimension of politics that polarized political opponents across the regime divide.
Ahmed investigates four historical cases in the study of democratic development: the United Kingdom between the Reform Act of 1832 and World War II (1832–1939), Imperial and Weimar–era Germany (1876–1933), the French Third Republic (1870–1939), and the United States before World War II (1789–1939). Focusing on legislative politics as an essential site of democratic governance and key to understanding long-term democratic endurance, she shows that when the regime question became salient, it hindered the formation of viable legislative coalitions along the left-right policy spectrum. This failure opened the door to executive encroachment, destabilizing the regime. Ahmed shows that the resurgence of the regime question today is not, as is often assumed, a break with prior trajectories of political development but a new instantiation of battles fought in previous eras. Amel Ahmed is associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of Democracy and the Politics of Electoral System Choice: Engineering Electoral Dominance. "A bold and innovative study with clear and important implications for contemporary politics. This book will be a major contributor to debates over democracy, democratic backsliding, American political development, and comparative historical institutionalism."-David Bateman, Cornell University
"After decades of taking democratic stability for granted in the West, the future of democracy is once again being debated. Amel Ahmed's The Regime Question provides well-needed historical context to these debates. This book reminds us how much this question structured Western political development up through 1945 and how much political stability after 1945 depended on its repression. Ahmed also shows that it brings in its train polarization, zero-sum politics, gridlock, and other divisive trends that impede effective governance. This book should be of immense interest to anyone trying to understand the challenges facing democracy today."-Sheri Berman, Barnard College
"An important contribution to the literature on historical democratization. The book's argument supersedes and improves upon the structural functionalist literature very significantly."-Giovanni Capoccia, University of Oxford
"An ambitious, sweeping account, spanning Europe and North America, from the nineteenth century to the present. With this book, Amel Ahmed distinguishes herself as an important and innovative voice on the history of democracy itself."-Daniel Ziblatt, coauthor of How Democracies Die "Interesting and innovative. . . . [The Regime Question] really contributes something different in a way that adds to the conversation"---Justin Kempf, Democracy Paradox
