Conceptualizing and Measuring Modern Democracy 1 CHAPTER ONE Conceptualizing and Measuring Modern Democracy* Felipe B. Miranda To date, numerous attempts by academics exploring democratic governance have not yielded a controlling concept of democracy. The main barrier to a commonly acceptable denition of democracy appears to be twofold: rst, even as theorists may agree much on democracy's necessary conditions, they continue to differ in perceptions of what comprise the set of its theoretically necessary and sufcient condition(s), and second, they also disagree on the intellectually more productive way(s) of exploring democracy in empirical societies, i.e. whether to settle for minimalist, essentially procedural treatments or to go beyond and give even greater emphasis on the performance of regimes on a set of substantive criteria (Knutsen, 2010: 110-112). Conceptual stretching and meaning conation have been real dangers in the daunting task of formulating democratic denitions, whether it is the root meaning of the concept or its associated attributes that are in question (Sartori, 1970; Collier and Levitsky, 1997; Keane 2009). There is also an intriguing possibility that academics theorizing on democracy's nature and examining empirical societies yield to biases that favor democratic readings even when the objective evidence is not strongly supportive of these claims. The iconic nature of democratic governance in current times may have provoked this popular bias among academics. The proliferation of adjectives qualifying allegedly democratic regimes, at times _________________ *This is an updated version of an earlier framework paper first published in Miranda, et al, Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy (Quezon City: Commission on Human Rights, Philippines and United Na ons Development Program, 2011)