Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy 3 Given the active work taking place in the measurement of democracy, its various elements and their operational indicators, the present author is convinced that it is not the measurement dimension of democracy that has greater criticality nowadays but its conceptualization. A fundamental reimaging of democracy needs to focus on the explicit addition of a demonstrably increasingly human quality of life, within an explicitly liberal time frame, for a regime to properly gain democratic status in current times. One does not speak here of idealized, maximalist democracy, only that kind which goes substantially further than the minimalist, procedural fixation with elections and related exercises, mostly formally existing but substantively underperforming political institutions and formal as well as informal processes of political participation. A dimension of regime performance is what separates formal or paper democracies from those that demonstrably protect and promote the welfare of their people. With its revised working definition of democracy, the paper finally reviews the record of political governance in the Philippines and regrettably is unable to regard it as that of a democracy. This assessment reflects the author's view that even O'Donnell's "delegative democracy" (O'Donnell 2009), a term also used to describe the Philippines, is probably a case of "conceptual stretching" and therefore not properly a subtype of democracy. A better classificatory label could be a "hybrid" regime which Diamond also aptly describes in most cases as a "pseudodemocracy"—a false or falsified democratic polity (Diamond 2009: 233). A. Defining Democracy There has been no lack of attempts to define or clarify what a democracy is. This is the case whether the focus is a past or contemporary polity (e.g. early Athens, contemporary Western societies such as Britain, France and the United States or a non-Western developed society like Japan), a discernibly emerging entity (for instance, successfully-transiting democracies like South Korea, India) or some idealized regime already immanent in contemporary history or contemplated for some distant future (Aristotle's 'polity', Fukuyama's liberaldemocratic state). Biases pro or contra democracy notwithstanding, the ages have witnessed a recurring interest in clarifying the nature of this particular polity's regime and how its dynamics might be understood. From Pericles' Athens to current times, democracy's definitional challenge has attracted many of the world's best minds and yet it has remained largely a contested concept – one that allows neither the modern professional political scientist nor the layman to make a definitive, convenient and confident reply to the question, "What is a democracy?"