In a democratic theoretician's ideal world, democratization and de-democratization would move along the same straight line, but in opposite directions. As our many encounters with historical experience have shown us, we do not live in an ideal world. The vivid histories of South Africa, Spain, and other regimes follow irregular trajectories fueled by unceasing political struggle. An already undemocratic South Africa de-democratized ferociously after 1948, only to undergo a democratic explosion after 1985; the second transition by no means simply reversed the first. In Spain, we witness sharp changes of direction after World War I, with the peaceful revolution of 1931, with Franco's victory in the civil war, and with the relaxation of Franco's regime starting in the 1960s. History abhors straight lines. Nevertheless it will help discipline our inquiry if we idealize for a moment. Figure 7-1 sketches three stylized trajectories from fairly low-capacity undemocratic regimes to higher-capacity democratic regimes.

Remember the meaning of state capacity: the extent to which interventions of state agents in existing non-state resources, activities, and interpersonal connections alter existing distributions of those resources, activities, and interpersonal connections as well as relations among those distributions. In a strong state trajectory, state capacity increases well before significant democratization occurs. As a result, the state enters democratic territory already in possession of means to enforce decisions arrived at through broad, equal, protected, and mutually binding citizen-state interaction.