xii Preface indefinitely put on hold while the citizenry suffer their rulers' predatory politics. Those who express dissent with this view and try to reveal the nondemocratic dynamics of their polity run the risk of being ridiculed as "impractical idealists," censured or jailed as "irresponsible" political opposition, destabilizing "alarmists," dangerous "subversives," violent "terrorists" and, less frequently, national "traitors". Beyond detention and jails lie more extreme risks for those who persist in unmasking the core dynamics of anti-democratic regimes. Authorities who have grown accustomed to a culture of impunity find much aid and comfort from scholarship and scholars that obfuscate the character of their demonstrably non-democratic regime. Even among those who actually are trying to help democratize nondemocratic polities, there is much danger in passing off struggling democratization initiatives as already substantially successful and offering a close equivalent to a functional democracy. Many of the polities now described as "democracies" reflect much disorientation when citizens try to square their nominal status as a democracy with the realities of their political life: frequent emasculation of their electoral processes, the numerous violations of their human rights, their long tradition of popular immiseration and continuing deterioration in their quality of life and, above all, the glaring nonaccountability of predatory authorities basking in impunity. Many of those who err in the liberal identification of democratization with democracy may plead a desire to motivate the authorities as well as the citizenry towards deepening their democratic commitments. While their intention might be commendable in some cases of polities initially trying to democratize, political mythmaking – particularly those employing "noble lies" - has a long history of incompatibility with sustainable democratic development. Indeed one might recall in this regard the old adage that the road to perdition is paved with good intentions. Much better, it appears to the authors of the present volume, to hew closer to the truth – la verità effetuale della cosa (the effectual truth of the matter) in Machiavelli's words – as it is this truth that probably will free people from predatory politics and help them find their way into freedom and democracy. It is in the context of these deliberations that the present authors explore the absorbing issue of whether the Philippines qualifies as a modern democracy. After devoting a full chapter on the issue of conceptualizing and measuring democracy, three more chapters follow in which structural-