ABSTRACT
This last chapter focuses on the practical anchor of generic institutionalism, finally. In order to define democracy or to identify proxies for its definition we consider it preliminary as an evolving web of political economic institutions, capable of actual people-driven governance. Democratic governance has a long and very rich history and its institutions evolved in manifold ways. Its cultural memory goes back to ancient Athens with first democracies in Greek city-states (poleis) with 2000–4000 people on average. Today the Republic of India is the world's most populous democracy with over 1.2 billion people. Still the basic idea of democracy has not changed from a formal perspective over 2000 years; nonetheless the concept of an institution changed a lot over this period of time. Nowadays democratic institutions are also influenced and partly governed by informal institutional rule systems, adding complexity day by day. For this reason a brief outline of the evolution of democratic institutions and models of democracy is given in the first section of this chapter with regard to Held (1996).
