George Soros And South Africa's Elite Transition http://www.swans.com/library/art16/barker51.html

"Certainly, struggles for popular democracy are profound threats to established elites. In many democratic transitions, these threats have been dissipated by the promotion of polyarchy as the new dispensation. What has occurred in such contentious transitions (such as South Africa) has been an attempt to construct hegemony via a reformulation of the mode of political rule: from the overtly coercive (such as apartheid) to a more consensual-based order.

The result has been to pre-empt fundamental economic changes that may arise through any popular alternatives and instead, preserve the extant economic structures, albeit with necessary changes that incorporate fractions of the new emerging elite. Co-option of the democratisation movement into the structures of polyarchical democracy performs this task. Such an arrangement is the political counterpart to neo-liberalism, with the 'visible hand of the voter' working alongside the mythical meta-physical 'market'."  —Ian Taylor