2 Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy current times may have provoked this popular bias among academics. The proliferation of adjectives qualifying allegedly democratic regimes, at times reflecting excessive conceptual stretching and/or meaning-conflation, arguably 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 democracy (Collier and Levitsky 1997: 442). Consequently, working definitions (i.e. generally provisional rather than theoretically definitive delineations) have become common in the academic literature on democracy. After considering them, the present paper adopts its own, a modified formulation building on one recently offered by Schmitter and Karl (2009). 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 (2009: 4). 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 immediately add as an integral part of the definition the following: 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 fifty years of a regime's formal, democratic initiation. A summary review of the academic attempts to measure democracy and democratization is then undertaken, with the main findings emphasizing the need to confront problems of measurement in the social sciences, particularly since democracy methodologies exclusively resorting to a focus on continuous variables, minimizing or ignoring the substantive categorical character of a democracy, could induce conceptual conflation. 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 could easily gloss 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).