Direct rule enables democracy but has mostly sustained authoritarian regimes

Evidence

Not until the nineteenth century was there widespread adoption of direct rule, creation of structures extending governmental communication and control continuously from central institutions to individual localities or even to households, and back again. Even then, direct rule ranged from the unitary hierarchies of centralized monarchy to the segmentation of federalism. On a large scale, direct rule made substantial citizenship, and therefore democracy, possible. Possible, but not likely—much less inevitable. Instruments of direct rule have sustained many oligarchies, some autocracies, a number of partyand army-controlled states, and a few fascist tyrannies. Even in the era of direct rule most regimes have remained far from democratic. — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 183

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s project testing whether institutional absorption (a form of direct rule extending to citizen-state relations) channels rather than defuses politicization — Tilly’s ‘possible, not likely’ cautions against treating rights regimes as democratic by default. — connects to: Democracies prescribe few performances but tolerate many while high-capacity autocracies do the reverse — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 446
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 183