To say that ‘democracy’ is a hotly contested concept is to parrot a cliché. Democracy realists (Przeworski, 1991) warn us of overloading the term with too many meanings. The proliferation of definitions of democracy with adjectives and characteristics of all sorts has led scholars to articulate legitimate anxieties about stretching the concept of democracy to such an extent as to render it analytically meaningless. Against minimalist and maximalist views, and advocating somewhat of a middle-range perspective, Terry Lyn Karl (1990) suggests that democracy be conceived of an institutional arrangement in which competitive elections are complemented by mechanisms to hold elected representatives accountable to the rule of law. Reiterating this view, Marc Plattner (1998) makes a case for emphasizing the compact between liberalism and democracy.

Chantal Mouffe disagrees. She directs attention to the fraught conceptual histories between liberalism and democracy to support her argument that there is in fact no necessary relation between the two (Mouffe, 2000). In similar vein, David Beetham suggests that democracy refers at once to ‘control by citizens over their collective affairs, and equality between citizens in the exercise of that control’ (Beetham, 1999, 3). Likewise, Huber et al., (1997) suggest equal participation in public affairs as one of the characteristics of substantive democracy. The collapse of the so-called ‘people's democracies’ and the concomitant ascendance of Liberal democracy during the 1990s not only provided a favourable intellectual climate for the flourishing of liberal rights, but also made Liberal democracy susceptible to egalitarian claims (Schmitter, 1994). Based on these somewhat contradictory insights, we have a fragmentary conceptualization of democracy that include rather disparate characteristics: competitive elections, the guarantee of civil liberties and individual rights, protection of private property and establishment of the rule of law on the one hand, and equal participation of people in the affairs that matter to them on the other.