The governors of a regime do not have the freedom to make intellectual comparisons of different types of regime. The governing elite must take as given the regime that their predecessors have supplied. For governors to debate whether a different regime would be better would question the support on which it rests. In a democratic regime reforms can be openly debated and advocating change is accepted as a legitimate role of the loyal opposition (Dahl, 1971). In an undemocratic regime, challenges to the institutions that confer power on governors can be viewed as a sign of disloyalty and end up in a split in the political elite between advocates of competing regimes.

Comparative politics supplies a great variety of regimes to those who refuse to support their current system, but national history offers many intellectual constraints on choice. The shortcomings of the current regime impose limitations on institutions and leadership as well as material resources. This is evident in the three regimes that have ruled Russians in the past century. World War I showed that the tsarist empire lacked the resources to defend the country against an invader; its pre-1914 history showed that it had neither the resources nor the will to introduce reforms that would turn an arbitrary regime into a constitutional monarchy. The Bolsheviks supplied a new type of regime, a one-party dictatorship, and the Communist Party supplied the cadres necessary to mobilize support from subjects.