Somewhere I heard about an interesting theory. It connects developments in military technology with political systems.
The idea is that, for example, with the invention of gunpowder technology, it became easy to turn any peasant into a soldier just by giving him a musket. Thus it became important to be able to conscript as many of them when needed. In exchange, some concesion had to be made. Peasant was given a certain amount of political power and rights, or at least an ilusion of those. They had to be emotionally involved in the cause. As a result we got nationalism, democracy, total wars etc.
Military power in the era before relied on highly trained professionals. Armored knight on a horse is an unstopable force, like a tank. But he is expensive. From this we get monarchies.
In reality, history of these things cannot be reduced to a single causelike this. Yet I wonder what the current development in military tech means for the future. Professional soldiers are again much more important than the number of random guys with a rifle. Also robotics will from now on play a big role. And sophisticated inteligence gathering and infiltration is valuable, because it avoids open large scale combat altogether. How will this change political systems?