This is an incredible difficult question to answer as the nineteenth-century Germans themselves were somewhat unclear as to how to classify their state. The Kaiserreich possessed a hybrid political system with a national parliament elected by universal suffrage, an executive authority that had little responsibility to that parliament, a federal system of largely monarchical states, and a judiciary that was socially conservative, but zealously guarded both the rule of law and was no catspaw of the central government. Among the largely Protestant German professoriate, this heterogeneous conglomeration meant that the Kaiserreich was a symbol of a "Third Way" between the Republicanism of France and absolutism exemplified by tsarist Russia. However, things looked less rosy for those Germans that had to operate within this political system, and by the twentieth century the shortcomings of the system were the cause of persistent grumblings along the whole political spectrum of German politics.

One of the key issues surrounding this classification of the Kaiserreich for historians is the issue the extent and scale of the democratic character of the German state. There are two historiographic answers to the question of "how democratic was Imperial Germany" and both lay out persuasive points for both a (soft) affirmative and the negative.

In the postwar 1950s and 60s, the Bielefeld-school led by Hans-Ulrich Wehler painted a coherent picture of Germany’s trajectory towards illiberal dictatorship and racism. Wehler in particular emphasized that Bismarck subverted democratic processes that retarded political development. Termed either Caesarism or Bonapartism by Wehler, he argued Imperial Germany's executive branch (both the Kaiser and the Chancellor) bypassed electoral checks and oversights so that innovations like universal male suffrage ended up meaningless. While it was not an absolute monarchy, Wehler asserted that Bismarck was able to use nationalism as a tool to craft an authoritarian state and undermine constitutional checks and balances. Later historians like James Sheehan and Wolfgang Mommsen contended that German structural problems, such as the nation’s vast regional diversity and divergent political and economic developments, contributed to a gradual narrowing of liberalism’s chances to achieve meaningful political success in the united Germany. Mommsen argued that despite the existence of universal male suffrage in the federal Reichstag, the state governments, especially Prussia which had a restricted three-tiered franchise and was the largest state, could block any meaningful chances of political reform. By the same token, John Röhl argued that the latent strength that the Bismarckian constitution gave the German executive allowed it to operate with a degree of relative autonomy from the Reichstag and when coupled with an erratic personality like Wilhelm II, the results were an authoritarian mess. To many of these historians, the failure of the 1848 Revolutions represented a turning point that failed to turn in that it was a chance to cement national sovereignty inside a parliament. This failure contributed to an aberrant path within Germany's political development (called by historians the Sonderweg).

Around the 1980s, newer generations of historians began to question the determinism and pessimism of Bielefelders and other historians. One of the landmark books questioning the Sonderweg''s teleological aspects was Blackbourn and Eley's The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany. What this book did is examine many of the assumptions of earlier historians and the veracity of their claims of German illiberalism. One aspect that Eley and Blackbourn dissect is using "the West" especially Great Britain as a paradigmatic model for Imperial Germany's lack of democratic development. They contended that such comparisons drew upon a simplified picture of British politics and ignored areas in which German democratic institutions were stronger than the British case. Margaret Lavinia Anderson's Practicing Democracy: Elections and Political Culture in Imperial Germany extended this critique further than Blackbourn and Eley. Her central thesis is that despite Bismarck's antidemocratic intentions, the more Germans participated in democratic elections, the better they got at them. She turns some of the comparisons of Germany with the West on their head by arguing that Imperial Germany lacked such things like "Rotten Burroughs," (safe electoral districts), voter restrictions, and voter patronage systems that were endemic within the allegedly paradigmatic Britain and Western democracies. Anderson argues that the archaic monarchical order was not strong enough to prevent German from experiencing mass democracy, but hindered development enough that “hot family feuds” of the German national community erupted in repressive measures such as the Kulturkampf or the anti-socialist legislation. One of the astute observations Anderson made was that the supposedly archaic political institutions upheld by the Bielefelders were in a constant state of flux. The tiered franchise system for the state elections appeared increasingly out of step with modern developments in the twentieth century. The southern German states (Baden, Bavaria, and Württemberg) had actually instituted universal suffrage in state electoral reforms of 1904-06. Prussia was the main hold out to this trend, but the explosive growth of Berlin made the prospects of Prussia being a stronghold for conservative Junker interests increasingly tenuous. Furthermore, the very existence of the tiered franchise provided Germany's left-wing political parties a viable issue with which to attack the government.

The challenges raised by Anderson and other recent scholars like Dieter Langewiesche have not gone unanswered by those historians who see Imperial Germany as fundamentally undemocratic. Volker Berghahn challenged Anderson in an essay in Central European History accusing her of focusing too much on minutia and losing the larger picture of the political trajectory of modern Germany, which eventually led to the Third Reich.

So this leaves the question of "how democratic was Imperial Germany?" open. The larger point of the above detour into German historiography is that there is no sure consensus among historians as to whether the Kaiserreich was democratic or not. Wehler, Berghahn, Anderson, Rohl, Sheehan, Mommsen, Eley, Lerman and slew of other historians have taken the above to argue either Germany was undergoing a process of democratizing or had significant structural impediments mitigating against it. There is a rich vein of historiography on this question that makes a basic answer yes or no answer tricky because the question of what is democratic can be highly subjective. This subjectivity can be dangerous if it is unexamined as it leads to distortions in understanding the past. Part of the crux of the matter depends upon how one defines "democratic". For example, if one defines democracy and citizenship as for the benefit of all citizens irrespective of gender, then Imperial Germany fails along with every other major Western democracy (save New Zealand and Australia) prior to the First World War because national women's suffrage was not present. Both historiographic camps had differing interpretations of democracy and that colored both of their comparisons with other democracies and their conclusions.