Liberal democratic elections simply do not allow for revolution. Electoral participation, especially if a party wishes to gain office, necessitates compromises that render radical policy goals unsustainable. Once the decision to participate in elections has been made, radical parties are faced with a choice of either forsaking their revolutionary policies or facing electoral marginalisation. Elections are a tool which largely preserves the liberal democratic state and protects the status quo, closing down the space for radical change. In order to succeed at elections, parties must fractionalise their long-term goals into short-term aims that appeal to a wide sector of voters and they must use the existing system to deliver benefits to supporters rather than attempting to overthrow the system in its entirety. Small and niche parties may strive to offer distinct alternatives compared to mainstream parties, but they still need to be seen to accept the existing system and try to use it to benefit their supporters if they are to be viable parties in the eyes of voters.

This moderating logic can take hold even in the case of parties that originally participated in elections in a strategic fashion with a view to destabilising the system from within. Once the decision to participate is made, parties can become locked-in to this decision in a path-dependent process of increasing returns, whereby the party becomes heavily incentivised to engage more and more with elections and high costs become associated with leaving this electoral path. This process was the driving force behind the moderation of a range of radical parties in Europe, including the transformation of socialists into social democrats and the compromises that rigid Christian Democracy underwent. In this way, the inclusion of radial parties within a stable set of electoral institutions gradually extracts moderation and restricts the scope for radicalism.

Electoral participation had just such an impact upon the radicalism of Irish republicans. The decision to participate in elections in 1981 represented a critical juncture for republicanism. The path it chose pushed it in an increasingly moderate direction, rejecting parallel states in favour of ambivalent electoral participation and seeking to build a support base within the nationalist bloc of voters in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.