Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy 5 A. 1.1 Popular sovereignty and representative governance. The idea of "the people" rather than the monarch, or the monarch and his court, wielding and being the very source of political power and thus legitimizing governance and all political institutions, is at the core of democratic theorizing. In ancient and pre-modern societies, the dominant rule was that the people who could legitimately participate in governance did not include every adult man or woman or for that matter even every citizen. From Athens in the 5th century where the citizenry comprised possibly less than a fourth or fifth of the citystate's population and where slaves, artisans (banausikos) and female citizens were denied formal political participation, to the 19th century when most of the now 'consolidated' Western democracies still continued to disable large segments of their political constituencies from electoral participation, this process of political exclusion may be observed. It bears noting that during this time and up until the turn of the 20th century, most democratic thinkers showed little aversion to a limiting or exclusivist view of "the people" – the citizens who may be extended full political rights by the polity. Those without property, the uneducated, women, slaves and ethnic minorities suffered much neglect and thus political discrimination in the musings of democratic theorists of the 17th to the 19th centuries. Even for the United States in the mid-1860s, Lincoln's democracy invoking "a government of the people, by the people, for the people" did not have a well-developed, inclusive sense of its primary term—"the people". Women and slaves did not have full political rights, the povertystricken and propertiless could be discriminated against, and the exercise of suffrage by these politically marginalized groups would wait for another century, the 20th, to materialize. So blatant is the exclusivist bias of the idea "people" in those times that a modern democratic theorist observes that Not a single democratic government can be found in the 19th century and it was not until the first decade of the twentieth century that two countries, Australia and New Zealand, fully democratic regimes with firm control of government institutions and universal adult suffrage, were established (Lijphart 1984: 37). Lijphart notes that even the United States and Switzerland must not be attributed full democratic status until the 1970s, when the former finally lifted electoral restrictions on the blacks as a result of the enactment of civil rights laws and the latter allowed women to vote in national elections. (Lijphart 1984: 38-39) “The people" in contemporary democratic theorizing obviously has taken on a much more comprehensive sense, with just about every citizen now presumed to be a competent participant in the processes of democratic