Conceptualizing and Measuring Modern Democracy 15 and representative governance, political participation and popular control, political equality and freedom, rule of law, public accountability) may be said to encompass practically all conceptual loads that various schools of democratic thought reect. One can go through the authors cited in this essay so far and their respective views of democracy interestingly will contain most if not all the ideas listed in this summary review. One can extend his survey of democratic theorists and researchers to others not reviewed here and the same observation could be made. It is primarily in the way theorists divide on how to approach the study of democracy and the priorities of acknowledged salient concerns that we can distinguish academic biases/preferences that, unfortunately, in the course of intellectual debate, articially provoke heated discussions but not much enlightenment. Those who would approach democracy by considering its procedures and processes can easily make peace with colleagues who would deepen the democracy probes through substantive ethical, 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 increasingly is expected to serve. The current essay assumes that the constituent ideas identied 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 identied. Without it, especially in modern times, it would be futile to recognize non-democracies from those that ttingly deserve democratic classication. Its identication 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. An Alternative Working Denition of Modern Democracy In the present project, an alternative denition of modern democracy is used by the project collaborators. It builds on an earlier denition by Schmitter and Karl (2009:4) as they wrestled with the issue of "What democracy is … and Is