Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy 13 Views and sentiments similar to those of Mayo's on the numerous, professional attempts to clarify the meaning of democracy are found in the extensive literature that has emerged on the subject. In 2009, a prominent democratic theorist observes: Few conceptual issues in political science have been subjected to closer or more prolific scrutiny in recent decades that this problem of "what democracy is…and what it is not" and which regimes are democracies and which not. We are replete with definition and standards and tools of measurement. But the curious fact is that—a quarter century into the "third wave" of democratization and the renaissance it brought in comparative democratic studies—we are still far from consensus on what constitutes "democracy." And we still struggle to classify ambiguous regimes (Diamond, 2009: 229). Given the welter of contesting and often confusing definitions, Mayo (1960: 22-24) very early suggested that it is probably the common usage of democracy in the sense of "government or rule by the people" that could minimize the intellectual confusion in his own time—a state of affairs that unfortunately has persisted up to now. Many students of democracy disagree with Mayo on this point. Those adopting a Schumpeterian view of democracy as a method of governance or rule, may acknowledge some utility of common usage in defining democracy but would insist nevertheless on clarifying democratic rule as first of all practically equivalent to competitive elections (Huntington 1993: 6-8). Together with others who find much that is problematic in fully operationalizing the idea of 'rule by the people' (Heywood 2007: 72-76) or in analyzing ideologically vulnerable, purposive ends like "freedom," they offer modified, procedurally-oriented typologies, e.g. the majoritarian and consensus democracies of Lijphart (1984), to explore democracy and its main variations, or at least sound a stronger caveat to taking the popular usage of the term as a sufficiently clear definition. One can't help but wonder why this divide between the proceduralists and the substantivists has persisted to current times. There could be a deeper philosophical/methodological divide between those who consider democracy as fundamentally a method or procedure of governance and those who would insist on its substantive, purpose-oriented content as a primary concern. The debate on the conceptual content and direction of democratic rule can perhaps be recast into the traditional disjunction between fact and value that persists among most social scientists. Procedural fact and valued outcomes relating to democratic polities often divide democracies' energetic explorers. Those emphasizing the method of rule, the procedures and processes of governance, argue that involving democracy scholars in futile debates regarding its alleged source-authority and final ends wind up with no more than ideological