Regime change follows from failures of class-fraction coalitions to achieve hegemony.

Evidence

The December crisis runs through a succession of different regimes, each representing a shifting coalition of class fractions. Daily, the political content of the Napoleonic state shifted, forming and dissolving. Each coalition temporarily gave rise to a suc cession of forms of regime; social republic, democratic republic, parliamentary republic. It is only as each exhausts its possibilities of hegemony, and is dissolved, since none can rule the whole social formation on its own, that the Bonapartist “solution” is prepared: the coup d’ é tat . — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 513

Categorization

• SEED: The ‘succession of regimes, each exhausting its possibilities of hegemony’ is a template readable onto any unstable coalition government — an essay angle on contemporary politics through Hall’s lens.