Conceptualizing and Measuring Modern Democracy 5 where slaves, artisans (banausikos) and female citizens were denied formal political participation, to the 19th century when most of the now 'consolidated' Western democracies still continued to disable large segments of their political constituencies from electoral participation, this process of political exclusion may be observed. It bears noting that during this time and up until the turn of the 20th century, most democratic thinkers showed little aversion to a limiting or exclusivist view of "the people" – the citizens who may be extended full political rights by the polity. Those without property, the uneducated, women, slaves and ethnic minorities suffered much neglect and thus political discrimination in the musings of democratic theorists of the 17th to the 19th centuries. Even for the United States in the mid-1860s, Lincoln's democracy invoking "a government of the people, by the people, for the people" did not have a well-developed, inclusive sense of its primary term -- "the people". Women and slaves did not have full political rights, the poverty-stricken and propertiless could be discriminated against, and the exercise of suffrage by these politically marginalized groups would wait for another century, the 20th, to materialize... So blatant is the exclusivist bias of the idea "people" in those times that a modern democratic theorist (Lijphart, 1984:37) observes that "Not a single democratic government can be found in the 19th century and it was not until the rst decade of the twentieth century that two countries, Australia and New Zealand, fully democratic regimes with rm control of government institutions and universal adult suffrage were established." Lijphart notes that even the United States and Switzerland must not be attributed full democratic status until the 1970s, when the former nally lifted electoral restrictions on the blacks as a result of the enactment of civil rights laws and the latter allowed women to vote in national elections. (Lijphart, 1984:3839) "The people" in contemporary democratic theorizing obviously has taken on a much more comprehensive sense, with just about every adult citizen now presumed to be a competent participant to the processes of democratic governance. Except for certain limitations relating to age, mental status and certain crimes, the previous historical disabilities suffered by several sectors have been at least formally waived in modern democracies. It bears noting that the empirical governance of modern countries credibly claiming to be a democracy also largely reects this expanded sense of the people and the controlling idea of popular sovereignty. (Mayo, 1960; Held, 1987; Diamond and Plattner, 2009) Popular sovereignty is the frame that denes the theoretical limits of democratic governance but the latter's practical operation seldom allows most citizens to be directly involved in the processes of national governance. The idea of direct political involvement of citizens in the daily running of a polity might have been possible in the small Athenian polis of the 5th century B.C. or in