Preface xi an acceptable formulation of democracy in current times where the citizenry's political freedoms, civil liberties, human rights and material well-being have patently expanded and qualitatively improved in most parts of the world. In particular, where quality of life has become universally a focus of governance, it stands to reason that demands must be made on democracies and allegedly democratizing regimes to show functionality and effective delivery on this oftneglected concern. If, given a generous time frame of fifty years, a regime fails to initiate and make viable the processes and institutions that modern democracies must develop to endure, if most of its citizenry are unable to live human lives, then there is a good chance that it is not democratic or truly interested in democratizing. Academics obviously are appalled by the prospect of misconceptualizing democracy and consequently erring in identifying actual regimes properly. Yet, given a generally liberal temperament and being prone towards civil discourse rather than caustic truthsaying, they have frequently given the benefit of the doubt to numerous non-democratic, oligarchic regimes and passed them off as democratizing ones, perhaps even an outright democracy its numerous deficits notwithstanding. No wonder the politically powerful – in particular those who are allergic to democratic rule – have learned to treat most scholars and scholarship in general as a minor inconvenience; these rulers are quick to appreciate that where scholarship is overly accommodating, extremely civil and obsessively polite, their practitioners are easily transformed into obliging courtiers or at the very least into generously accommodating "critical" collaborators. Beyond the academic's intellectual malaise and liberal scholarly ways lurks a greater danger in the practice of fudging regime classification and awarding democratic status liberally. Democracy's conceptual ambiguity and the predictable public confusion it creates help authoritarian and allied forms of non-democratic rule to survive and flourish. In the manipulative hands of selfserving non-democrats and power-hungry authoritarian leaders, the artifactual ambiguity of democracy facilitates political misrepresentation. Overly liberal scholarship often unwittingly assists in "nuclearizing" a weapon of mass deception, one fashioned deliberately by those who would dupe their own people into believing that their's is a democratic regime albeit less than "mature," "developed," or "perfect" at any given time of reckoning. The citizenry's political education is systematically subverted and their critical political awakening is aborted when unscrupulous authorities manipulatively engage in regime misrepresentation. Much time is bought by the authorities and democratization is effectively reduced to harmless rhetoric and