10 Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy hollow. Political authorities and agencies that systematically violate their mission of rule for the people—a betrayal that is often facilitated by instruments of mass deception and undertaken in the worst cases with impunity—do not permit even established democracies to last for long. In polities struggling to initiate or sustain democratization, the continuing lack of effective political accountability is indicative of failed democratization. For a polity to deserve democratic status even at a minimal level, this defect must not be present. Accountability mechanisms initially are associated with credible elections, when people choose to replace with new authorities those that have shown themselves less than competent in discharging the functions of ruling. Besides elections, constitutionally-mandated processes of recall, impeachment, referenda and the more regular criminal prosecution of erring authorities are part of a polity's accountability measures. In theory as well as in practice, the ultimate exercise of political accountability takes place when an entire nation engages in a forcible displacement of the ruling authorities. A.2 A Conceptual Conundrum of Sorts Given the lead ideas that have informed democratic theorizing across the years, one might be led to expect that a consensual if not altogether precise and controlling definition of democracy would already have emerged. This has not been the case and the contemporary literature reflects much variation and outright tension in the numerous conceptions of democracy (Munck 2009: 128129). Across two thousand years of conceptual clarification, democracy, like most of the great themes of history, has defied resolution even as the greatest minds of the times struggled with it. To date, it remains a much contested concept. At best, "working definitions" of democracy have been offered by numerous scholars if only to enable their audiences to understand how they might be using the term in their particular studies (Schumpeter 1947; Mayo 1960; Lijphart 1988; Huntington 1993: Van Hanen 2010). Typologies and models of democracy have been attempted from the time of Aristotle (Aristotle/Barker trans. 1962: 162-169) and the tradition carries on to modern times (Held 1987: 13-299; Lijphart 1988: 1-60; Heywood 2007: 75-81). Schumpeter' classic treatise on regime types, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, has provided a procedurally-oriented definition of modern democracy. He situates the critical element of democratic governance in what he calls the "democratic method." This is "that institutional arrangement for