14 Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy, Second Edition closed system, democracy provides the greater challenge, the wider opportunities; but not of repose, since 'repose' is not the destiny of man. (Mayo, 1960:309)" The professional literature on democracy and democratization has grown much faster than on other social science concerns – Schmitter's own description of this phenomenon is "a burgeoning of democratization studies" (2010: 18). This proliferation of books, journal articles and even quasi-academic opinion pieces on democracy and democratization obviously has to do with its nearly universal appeal. Political regimes across the board, from left to right in terms of ideological location and including some that are demonstrably antidemocratic, insist on at least a formal identication with this iconic regime. The Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, an economist, has actually repeatedly drawn attention to this remarkable catholicity of democracy in current times. Other writers have at various times commented similarly. (Amartya Sen, "Democracy as a Universal Value" in Diamond and Plattner, 2009: xxviii, 315-320; Heywood, 2007: 71-72; also see Crick, 2002:8 and Mayo, 1960: 21-22) Although most pronounced in the latter half of the 20th century (Lijphart, 1984:37; Huntington, 1993:3-5), democracy's popularity is not really a recent phenomenon. In 1951, the UNESCO convoked over a hundred scholars worldwide to study democracy and not one of those assembled registered a negative attitude regarding the object of their collective study. The 1951 UNESCO report on the conference noted: Probably for the rst time in history, democracy is claimed as the proper ideal description of all systems of political and social organization advocated by inuential proponents. (Democracy in a World of Tension, UNESCO, Paris, 1951 as cited in Mayo, 1960:21.) With the resurgence of ofcial policies explicitly promoting democracy abroad in the early 1980s, democracy gained further popularity. The United States, together with Britain, Germany, Holland and various international and intergovernmental agencies including those of the United Nations, the World Bank as well as many private foundations engaged in democracy promotion worldwide and provided even more impetus for democracy studies. (Munck, 2009:2-12) A decade later, Fukuyama's inuential End of History and the Last Man (1991) would ride the same democracy bandwagon in implying that the nal political arrangement – basically a well-developed liberal democratic state – might have already come to stay. (Interestingly, much earlier, Hegel had also situated an ultimate arrangement in the Prussian state of the 1830s (Berlin, 2003), a polity that would be hard for people nowadays to recognize or accept as a modern democracy.) Midway Between Maximalist and Minimalist Conceptions of Democracy This set of constituent ideas comprising democracy (popular sovereignty