As argued in the introduction to this book, the discipline of comparative politics is still in need ofan analytical model that, departing from simple assumptions about the preferences and strategies of political actors, spells out the different social and political conditions that result in the establishment ofeither democratic constitutions, right-wing authoritarian regimes or left-wing dictatorships.

In this chapter I build a formal theory of the choice of political regimes in two steps. In the first section, I formally model an economy in which the population varies along two dimensions – the level of capital endowment of each individual, and the extent to which capital is mobile and can actually be taxed – and discuss the distributional consequences that different political regimes have on different types of individuals.

In the second section, I take up the question ofhow and with what results those different redistributive consequences inform the strategies that different political actors, diverse in terms of their level of income, capital mobility and political resources, follow to determine the system of government. This section shows that a democratic outcome becomes possible when the inequality of conditions among individuals, and therefore the intensity of redistributive demands, falls to the point that an authoritarian strategy to block redistribution ceases to be attractive to the well-off. It reveals as well that the likelihood of democracy increases when the mobility of capital goes up.