4 Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy In a situation like this, inquiries into the nature of a democracy usually start by enumerating the attributes that people ascribe to polities popularly acknowledged to be democracies. Prominent among these structural features are ideas so closely associated with the concept of a democracy that they became its constituent ideas or elements. In examining these core attributes, the obvious hope is that democracy's inherent nature would be made manifest. A.1 Democracy's Constituent Ideas While it is true that attributes should not be confused with a concept's definition, those that are sine qua nons for the concept's integrity as well as its empirical operationalization are obviously important. In the case of democracy, an array of such attributes has been considered indispensable by those exploring the nature of democracy. Starting from classical Greek times when non-democrats like Plato and Aristotle viewed democracy mainly from the prism of unstable rule by the many freeborn who are poor (Aristotle/Barker trans. 1962: 164), the idea of democracy historically grew with the times, increasingly identifying itself with an expanding constellation of ideas: popular sovereignty and representative governance, human equality and freedom, political participation, the rule of law and political accountability. These ideas may be considered as democracy's conceptual load. Thus, in the writings of Locke, Rousseau, Madison, James and John Stuart Mill, Marx, among others, popular sovereignty, freedom and democracy were made practically equivalent in conceptual content or at least were considered inextricably linked to each other. This probably unavoidable conceptual conflation is why most democratic theorizing from the 17th to the 19th centuries reflected a growing preference or bias for liberal democracy. (A notable exception is Marx whose irreconcilable critique of capitalism and its "superstructural," political organizational forms equated even the liberal state with class exploitation rendering it incapable of being truly democratic. Less radical social democrats are distinguishable from their liberal counterparts in arguing for increasing the public realm amenable to government intervention where the latter, reflecting their distrust for state intervention in areas of civil, economic and personal freedom, would strive to limit the public sphere to a minimum.) The 20th century largely continued with this liberal democratic bias (Plattner 2009), spurred on by the examples of the United States and the United Kingdom – two countries that enjoyed much international prestige as the restructuring, post-war world searched for political models. Towards the latter half of the 20th century, however, a more wary attitude regarding earlier liberal democratic models may be noted in some democracy assessments (Pateman 1985; Zakaria 1997).