Most scholars define democracy as necessary and sufficient conditions

Evidence

Chapter 4 provides a concrete application of many of the ideas outlined in this chapter in the context of concepts and measures of democracy. I show that most comparative scholars conceptualize democracy in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. I use the mathematical machinery introduced here to generate a quantitative measure of democracy that fits much better the concept of democracy than those typically used in the literature. — Gary Goertz, Social Science Concepts, 464

Categorization

• XREF: Links to the book’s democracy chapter and to standard indices like Polity and Freedom House that treat democracy as a graded scale rather than a set of necessary conditions.