Abstract

The recent trend toward democratization in countries across the globe has challenged scholars to pursue two potentially contradictory goals: increasing analytic differentiation in order to capture the diverse forms of democracy that have emerged, and avoiding the problem of conceptual stretching that arises when the concept of democracy is applied to cases for which, by relevant scholarly standards, it is not appropriate. This article argues that the pursuit of these two goals has led to the proliferation of conceptual innovations, including numerous subtypes of democracy - that is to say, democracy "with adjectives". The article explores the strenghts and weaknesses of the alternative strategies of conceptual innovation that have emerged and evaluates the trade-offs among them.