2 Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy, Second Edition reecting excessive conceptual stretching and/or meaning-conation, leads to much analytical confusion in the study of democracies. Beyond their possible obfuscatory effects on analytical clarity, the normative implications of creating new democratic subtypes must concern those probing the nature of contemporary democracy (Collier and Levitsky, 1997:442.) Consequently, working denitions (i.e. generally provisional rather than theoretically denitive delineations) have become common in the academic literature on democracy. After considering them, the present paper adopts its own, a modied formulation building on one earlier offered by Schmitter and Karl (2009:4). Their original formulation is: Modern political democracy is a system of governance in which rulers are held accountable for their actions in the public realm by citizens, acting indirectly through the competition and cooperation of their elected representatives. We modify this to read: Modern political democracy is a system of governance in which the authorities or rulers are held accountable for their actions in the public realm by citizens acting mostly indirectly through (1) the competition and cooperation of their elected representatives and (2) their involvement in politically active civil society groups. And, precisely to facilitate the detection of self-serving, falsied claims to democratic governance by numerous regimes worldwide, add as an integral part of the denition the following stipulation: As a system of governance , it demonstrably promotes – however slowly or gradually, even allowing for occasional, temporary reverses – a progressively human quality of life for its citizens within fty years of the regime's formal, democratic initiation. A summary review of the academic attempts to measure democracy and democratization is then undertaken, with the main ndings emphasizing the need to confront problems of measurement in the social sciences particularly as democracy methodologies exclusively resorting to a focus on continuous variables, minimizing or ignoring the substantive categorical character of a democracy could induce conceptual conation. With degree rather than substance difference taking precedence in these measures, the danger of passing off even non-democratic polities as democratic ones cannot be ignored. What this measurement bias easily glosses over is that transiting towards a democratic order is not necessarily the same as going or being democratic. Democratization does not automatically graduate to democracy -- an elementary reminder that even a sophisticated theorist of democracy believes many of his readers ought to remember better (Schmitter, 2010:18). Given the active work taking place in the measurement of democracy, its