Hard and Soft Authoritarianism, 8th Jan., 2011.

According to Edwin A. Winckler's article:

Three relationships regulate the transition from hard to soft authoritarianism: between institutionalization and participation, between external and internal factors, and between formal and informal arrangements. The most important domestic political relationship, occupying most of this article, is that between institutionalization and participation. In Huntington's already classic formulation, maintaining political order in changing societies requires maintaining a balance between the capacity of elite state institutions and the volume of mass political mobilization. [3] As to how this formulation applies to specifically authoritarian regimes, the first position to enter the comparative politics literature assumed that social modernization accompanying the early light-industrial stages of economic development would produce a crisis of demand for increased mass participation, leading to democratization. [4] A second position then argued that the elite institutions of contemporary modernizing authoritarian regimes are pre-adapted to contain such mass demand for participation, particularly if they have robust ruling party organizations. In some accounts this stability is reinforced by consensus among elites on the need for a strong state to mobilize capital and steer development during the late, expensive, heavy-industrial phases of economic development. [5] However, a third position soon proposed that tensions between institutional elites themselves, partly occasioned by the need to adjust to rapid socio-economic change, might still produce the breakdown of authoritarianism and the possibility of a transition to democracy. [6]