Prologue ix Democracy, in turning iconic, makes for much confusion. Stretched to accommodate multiple senses that reect conated meanings, it runs the risk of being a portmanteau term, carrying whatever sense someone loads it with. Thus, contrary to what might be hoped for, a rm consensus eludes this oftprofessed governance mode; it lacks precise denition in discourse and even less clarity in practice. In discussions regarding democracy and democratization, much ambiguity and contestation exist not only among lay people but even among those trying for greater precision in their professional discourse. In the past fty years, conceptual clarity has not been served well by the numerous qualiers social scientists use in referring to democracy; this condition is compounded by their general tendency to neglect the initial clarication of democracy's integral properties to empirically exist and developmentally endure. The currently still popular, procedurally-oriented, minimalist conception reducing democracy to electoral contestation in selecting ruling authorities has not proved satisfactory to many scholars, including those provisionally adopting it in their empirical studies. Much intellectual malaise is apparent not only in their critiques and numerous modications of the Schumpeterian formulation but also in the legion of adjectives they use to discuss democracy and its alleged empirical types. The resulting adjectival democracies generally reect much conceptual stretching, often acknowledging decits that their advocates say keep them from being "deeply" democratic but just the same do not disqualify them from being a democracy of sorts. This conceptual gymnastics has given rise to confounding descriptions of many polities as having a "façade," "awed," "immature," "defective," "illiberal," "delegative," or "hybrid" democracy. Concerned academics struggle in working their way through this maze of alleged democracy types. Consequently, precisely to avoid being misunderstood in their democracy studies, most scholars and researchers provide their working denitions of the generic or mother concept and the particular democratic progeny they are exploring in a particular work. In the present volume the authors pursue this essential interest in clarifying and operationalizing democracy's core meaning in modern times. In comparison with the familiar Schumpeterian formulation, a more comprehensive, substantively-oriented conception of democracy results from their intensive labors. Without neglecting the critical role of elections in democratic governance, they draw attention to other modes of political contestation and political accountability that involve greater citizen participation. Furthermore, the authors make pragmatic demands of the concept precisely to increase the probability that in assessing specic historical regimes – in this case the focal interest is no less than their own country's political system – there would be less chance of mistaking an actual democracy as non-democratic or, vice-versa and with far more serious consequences, an actual non-democratic polity as a democracy. Thus their working denition of democracy in this volume requires the demonstrable, progressive