16 Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy Those who would approach democracy by considering its procedures and processes can easily make peace with colleagues who deepen the democracy probes through substantive ethical or philosophical analysis. How a democratic polity's authorities are chosen and how they govern has no inherent quarrel with what democracy must consider by way of its legitimate political objectives. The common weal is one of those objectives that democratic governance in modern times is increasingly expected to serve. The current essay assumes that the constituent ideas identified here are all necessary conditions for a modern democracy to be properly acknowledged as in place and operating. The degree to which each of them is present at any point in time may differ for different polities but at least some minimal degree of their presence and operation need to be demonstrated in polities claiming to be either democratizing or already a democracy. No maximalist/idealist demand is made here as regards anyone of these constituent elements but democratic regimes reasonably could be expected to show overall improvement on these dimensions over a relatively long period of time. There is no irrationality for the demand that each of democracy's constituent elements will strengthen and deepen over time in a truly functioning democracy. Persistently "dysfunctional" democracies are actually prudently better recognized as nondemocracies; analytical sharpness is facilitated and political costs are minimized. Beyond these constituent elements of a democracy, this paper argues yet one more concern needs to be more explicitly identified. Without it, especially in modern times, it would be futile to recognize non-democracies from those that fittingly deserve democratic classification. Its identification and raison d'etre are embedded in the next section, a short discourse on the conundrum that has developed in discussions of what a democracy is and is not. A.4 An Alternative Working Definition of Modern Democracy In the present project, an alternative definition of modern democracy is used by the project collaborators. It builds on an earlier definition by Schmitter and Karl (2009) as they wrestled with the issue of "What democracy is … and Is Not." Based on their extensive studies of democratic regimes in various settings, they concluded that: 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).