ABSTRACT
For a variety of reasons, some of which will be discussed, it is perhaps useful to think of transition from an authoritarian to a democratic system as consisting of two simultaneous but to some extent autonomous processes: a process of disintegration of the authoritarian regime, which often assumes the form of “liberalization,” and a process of emergence of democratic institutions. Democracy is a particular system of processing and terminating intergroup conflicts. This system has a number of characteristics that distinguish it from other political arrangements: From Adam Przeworski, “Some Problems in the Study of the Transition to Democracy,” in Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Comparative Perspectives, ed. Guillermo O'Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead. Specifically, in a capitalist democracy, capitalists retain the capacity to withhold a part of societal product because the profits that they appropriate are expected to be saved, invested, transformed into productive capacity, and partly distributed as gains to other groups.
