x Preface institutionalization of civil liberties, political rights, economic well-being and public accountability within a time-frame of fifty years, roughly two and a half generations, counting from the formal initiation of a country's democracy. Clearly, this comprehensive conception of democracy goes beyond the academically more popular minimalist, methodological or procedural ideas that skirt the substantive objectives of democratic governance. It deliberately makes part of the concept the quality of governance that impacts on the nurture, protection and progressive enhancement of a clearly human quality of life. Democracy thus conceived might be criticized as an exercise in idealism, as loading the concept with attributes and conditionalities that actual polities would find impossible to meet. People who make this criticism fail to appreciate the empirical dynamics of democracy, its clear bias and natural historical tendency towards human development and its progressive expansion. Practically every integral attribute of democracy has actually reflected this unmistakable trend. Popular sovereignty indeed has become more popular as the notion of "the people" universalized to include men and women, all races, creeds and erstwhile politically marginalized subjects. A similar expansion is noticeable in the greater number and better quality of competencies, freedoms, rights and responsibilities attributed to all those deemed human and properly acknowledged as essential to their political, economic and spiritual life. Democracy's language is grounded not only on the citizens' self-evident, inalienable rights nowadays; it also is anchored on the imperative of basic human needs and human development. Democracy's idea of legitimate political participation and the proper exercise of political accountability is no longer an exclusive preserve of elites and ruling authorities but the proper domain of every politically competent citizen. Most telling of all, all the people -- all now presumed human or entitled to humanity -- are predicated doctrinally by modern democracy as deserving a quality of life that readily differentiates them from brutes. Indeed the very concept of democracy has democratized across the ages and its rate of democratization has accelerated so much faster in modern times. This historical trend may suffer temporary setbacks in some national settings but progress is writ large in the overall history of democratic development. No academic idealism, no romantic illusion attends this substantive conception of democratic governance. On the contrary, this formulation of democracy embodies the pragmatic demand that the meaning of a concept be an ontologically dynamic, time-sensitive, historically evolving construct. What would be a satisfactory conception of democracy in ancient times or barely a hundred years ago – perhaps even as recently as sixty years ago -- is no longer