The Regime Question
Lecture by professor Amel Ahmed (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
- Date
- 12 May 2025
- Time
- 16:00 -17:30
- Location
- Bushuis/Oost-Indisch Huis
- Room
- E.102
The Regime Question: Foundations of Democratic Governance in Europe and the United States
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. 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.
About the speaker
Professor Ahmed's main area of specialization is democratic studies, with a special interest in elections, voting systems, legislative politics, party development, and voting rights. She examines these issues in historical and comparative perspective and her work combines a regional focus on Europe and the United States. She is author of “Democracy and the Politics of Electoral System Choice: Engineering Electoral Dominance” (Cambridge University Press, 2013) which won the Best Book Award from the European Politics and Society Section of the American Political Science Association. Her new book, entitled "The Regime Question: Foundations of Democratic Governance in Europe and The United States" (Princeton University Press, 2025) examines the dynamics and long-term impact of regime contention on political development in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and the United States throughout the 19th and 20th Centuries.
