Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy 15 Although most pronounced in the latter half of the 20th century (Lijphart 1984: 37; Huntington 1993: 3-5), democracy's popularity is not really a recent phenomenon. In 1951, the UNESCO convoked over a hundred scholars worldwide to study democracy and not one of those assembled registered a negative attitude regarding the object of their collective study. The 1951 UNESCO report on the conference noted: Probably for the first time in history, democracy is claimed as the proper ideal description of all systems of political and social organization advocated by influential proponents (Mayo, 1960: 21). With the resurgence of official policies explicitly promoting democracy abroad in the early 1980s, democracy gained further popularity. The United States, together with Britain, Germany, Holland and various international and intergovernmental agencies including those of the United Nations, the World Bank as well as many private foundations, engaged in democracy promotion worldwide and provided even more impetus for democracy studies. (Munck 2009: 2-12) A decade later, Fukuyama's influential End of History and the Last Man (1991) would ride the same democracy bandwagon in implying that the final political arrangement — basically a well-developed liberal democratic state — might have already come to stay. (Interestingly, much earlier, Hegel had also situated an ultimate arrangement in the Prussian state of the 1830s (Berlin 2003), a polity that would be hard for people nowadays to recognize or accept as a modern democracy.) A.3 Midway Between Maximalist and Minimalist Conceptions of Democracy This set of constituent ideas comprising democracy (popular sovereignty and representative governance, political participation and popular control, political equality and freedom, rule of law, public accountability) may be said to encompass practically all conceptual loads that various schools of democratic thought reflect. One can go through the authors cited in this essay so far and their respective views of democracy interestingly will contain most if not all the ideas listed in this summary review. One can extend his survey of democratic theorists and researchers to others not reviewed here and the same observation could be made. It is primarily in the way theorists divide on how to approach the study of democracy and the priorities of acknowledged salient concerns that we can distinguish academic biases/preferences that, unfortunately, in the course of intellectual debate, provoke heated discussions but not much enlightenment.