Amel Ahmed, Associate Professor of Political Science, has received the prestigious “Best Book Award”  from the European Politics and Society section of the American Political Science Association for her recent publication “Democracy and the Politics of Electoral System Choice.” The prize awards an outstanding book of political science concerning the politics of Europe that was published in the last year.

Ahmed’s book challenges one of our fundamental assumptions about democracy—that it is moving towards a more inclusive system. Ahmed argues that the electoral systems that were developed by the “advanced” democracies—Belgium, Britain, France, and the United States—were in fact deliberately designed to be exclusionary by using electoral systems to mitigate the threat of working class mobilization. According to Professor Daniel Ziblatt of Harvard University, the book and its insights “…should be taken seriously by scholars of contemporary authoritarianism and democracy as well as by students of political institutions more generally.”

This is Professor Ahmed’s first book, and can be found here. Other publications include When Election Rules Undermine Democracy (policy brief for the Scholars Strategy Network, 2013) and Revolutionary Blindspots: The Politics of Electoral System Choice in the Egyptian Transition (Middle East Law and Governance Journal, Sept. 2011 No. 3 Vol.2). She also will be teaching Intro to Comparative Politics 111 and Political Inquiry 791AB in the fall.