"Democracy" is hard to define, not only because it is vague, as many political standpoint, but more important, because what a person regarded as a paradigmatic case another would deny was a democracy at all. The word has acquired a high emotional charge in the last hundred years, has become a good tactic to apply to your own favorite type of regime and to deny their rivals. More diverse systems have been claimed as the democracies of one kind or another, and the word has been redefined competitive, to ...