One of the constants of political life is change. In contemporary democracies, individual politicians need to remain alert to the emergence of new issues and new political forces, to the erosion of old loyalties, and to the impact of random and unprecedented events. The politician who tries to ignore such developments is a politician who is likely to have only a short career. At the broader systemic level, the political system too must remain flexible and able to adapt to changing circumstances. Such adaptation may be a result of conscious action by leading political figures, but it may also result simply from the political dynamic of the system itself. One of the strengths of democracy has been that the system has generally been able to adapt to new circumstances, although there have been some spectacular failures in this regard, with Weimar Germany a prominent example of this.

The challenge of change applies to all types of political systems, not just the democratic. But there is a fundamental difference in the situation facing the authoritarian polity compared with the democratic. While the latter gives free rein to autonomous political activity, and therefore to the capacity of political forces other than the regime to operate independently and thereby to help shape the political system itself, one of the essential characteristics of authoritarian rule is the restriction of autonomous political activity. The rulers of authoritarian regimes seek to prevent autonomous political forces from having any influence in the political system. By confining such forces to established regime-sponsored channels of political activity, authoritarian leaders seek to isolate the effect of oppositional activity and prevent it from playing a major part in the unrolling of political life. To the extent that this sort of neutering of potential opposition forces is successful, the authoritarian regime's position is strengthened. But this also underlines the fact that the major political player in an authoritarian system is the regime (or its leading actors) itself. The principal (but not only) influence upon the way in which the political system develops in an authoritarian polity is the regime and the decisions it makes about how to respond to both real and potential challenges. The role the regime plays in shaping the contours of the political system is therefore generally much greater in authoritarian than in democratic polities, where that role is shared with non-regime forces.