Conceptualizing and Measuring Modern Democracy 21 This has not escaped the attention of their professional colleagues, earlier noted as also some of their keenest and most constructive critics. Almost a decade ago, Munck (2002:14) even summarized the good features of work done by those who struggle to create democracy indices and his generous observations remain valid and resonate with current times: To be fair, constructors of democracy indices tend to be quite self-conscious about methodological issues. Thus they explicitly present their denitions of democracy, highlight the attributes they have identied, and clearly distinguish these attributes according to their level of abstraction. Moreover, a few indices are quite exemplary in terms of how they tackle specic tasks. In this sense, Hadenius (1992) is very insightful in identifying the attributes that are constitutive of the concept of democracy as are Alvarez et al. (1996) with regard to how various attributes should be logically organized. Nonetheless there remains a lot of room for improvement with regard to both concept specication and conceptual logic. There is reason to be hopeful about better datasets and more challenging measures of democracy emerging in the near future. Obvious improvements in the methodological skills of social scientists studying democracy are already discernible in the quality of statistical processing as well as modeling work in academic publications since 2000 (Clague, et al., 2001; Wejnert, 2005; Bayer and Bernhard, 2010; Knutsen, 2010 ). Beyond simple associations suggested by rudimentary cross tabulations and with more sophisticated correlation analysis, there is causal modeling being done by those who would explore the dynamics of democratization and the nature of democracies deeper. (See Boix, 2001 for an illuminating study on the linkages and interactions between democracy and inequality; again also see Boix, 2003 -- his volume on "Democracy and Redistribution" – that more ambitiously offers "a unied model" deriving the distribution of different political regimes from the distribution – and effective redistribution -- of economic and political resources at some given time in some given setting. A unied theory of political transition obviously necessarily involves exploring redistributive operations and, if the transition is to succeed, redistributive outcomes.) Finally, in suggesting how the measurement of democracy and democratization might be improved, perhaps only one more note might be struck: the greater use of perception data generated by survey research in democracy studies. While not a novel idea or historical development, the greater utilization of subjective data by academics serves notice that the very science of democratic research has democratized, that is to say, the very subjects – the people acknowledged to be the ultimate sovereign in democratic polities – are able to nd their voice and make it a critical part of the vital public enterprise seeking to know more and understand better the dynamics of democracies worldwide.