This ACES-lecture by Professor Amel Ahmed (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), explores how historical battles over democratic regimes continue to shape political conflict today.

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.