Like every organism, a political system needs capabilities which it performs as a unit in its environment Capability means the behaviour of the political system as a unit in its environment Capabilities of a political system are also related to the types of inputs and outputs. They are of four kinds: regulative, extractive, distributive and responsive capabilities.
The capabilities are really ways of talking about the flows of activity into and out of the political system. They tell us how the political system is operating in its environment how it is shaping the environment and how it is being shaped by it. Really political systems differ in the types of capabilities they perform.
A democracy performs responsive capability more than any other. A dictatorship performs regulative capability more than others. A communist political system is more interested in distributive capability, that is, it shifts resources from the capitalist classes to the working classes. Almost all political systems perform extractive capabilities in the form of collecting taxes from the people. The performance of the capabilities enables a political system to perform its input-output conversion functions.