In recent decades, powerful institutions have packaged Western democracy for export around the globe. Although Western democracy is grounded in specific historical experiences and cultural assumptions, advocates have generally taken its normative status for granted. So too have most academics. Yet if democracy is broadly understood as government by "the people," it must necessarily differ along with "the people" in question. Just what "the will of the people" is and how it might be realized become questions of pressing importance. Rather than advance alternative definitions of democracy,...