Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy 1 CHAPTER ONE Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy 1 Felipe B. Miranda To date, numerous attempts by academics exploring democratic governance have not yielded a controlling concept of democracy. The main barrier to a commonly acceptable definition of democracy appears to be twofold: first, even as theorists may agree much on democracy's necessary conditions, they continue to differ in perceptions of what comprise the set of its theoretically necessary and sufficient condition(s), and second, they also disagree on the intellectually more productive way(s) of exploring democracy in empirical societies, i.e. whether to settle for minimalist, essentially procedural treatments or to go beyond and give even greater emphasis on the performance of regimes on a set of substantive criteria (Knutsen 2010: 110-112). Conceptual stretching and meaning-conflation have been real dangers in the daunting task of formulating democratic definitions, whether it is the root meaning of the concept or its associated attributes that are in question (Sartori 1970; Collier and Levitsky 1997). There is also an intriguing possibility that academics theorizing on democracy's nature and examining empirical societies yield to biases that favor democratic readings even when the objective evidence is not strongly supportive of these claims. The iconic nature of democratic governance in The author would like to acknowledge the great assistance rendered by Ms. Rosa Linda B. Miranda, his daughter, in writing this chapter. Without her provocative comments regarding the nature of democratization in the Philippines , the task of examining the nation's political regime and its history of governance would have been less exciting.