The article "Democracy with Adjectives: Conceptual Innovation in Comparative Research" by David Collier and Steven Levitsky explores the challenges scholars face in conceptualizing and differentiating various forms of democracy that have emerged in post-authoritarian regimes around the world. The authors argue that scholars aim to balance two potentially contradictory goals: increasing analytic differentiation to capture the diverse nature of these regimes and maintaining conceptual validity by avoiding conceptual stretching, which occurs when the concept of democracy is applied to cases where it is not fully appropriate. To address these challenges, scholars have employed several strategies of conceptual innovation. These include creating "diminished" subtypes of democracy, which are incomplete instances of democracy and help avoid conceptual stretching; "precising" the definition of democracy by adding defining attributes to better capture the essence of democracy; and shifting the overarching concept of democracy to a more general category, such as "regime" or "state," to introduce new analytic categories and provide finer differentiation. The authors also discuss the trade-offs among these strategies, noting that while some strategies can achieve both goals, others can only achieve one or the other. They emphasize the importance of scholars being self-conscious about the analytic and normative implications of their choices and the need to avoid "definitional gerrymandering," where new definitions are introduced frequently to accommodate anomalous cases. Overall, the article provides a comprehensive overview of the complex structure of conceptual innovations in the study of recent democratization, highlighting the need for clarity and consistency in the use of concepts to enhance the understanding of democratic processes and outcomes.The article "Democracy with Adjectives: Conceptual Innovation in Comparative Research" by David Collier and Steven Levitsky explores the challenges scholars face in conceptualizing and differentiating various forms of democracy that have emerged in post-authoritarian regimes around the world. The authors argue that scholars aim to balance two potentially contradictory goals: increasing analytic differentiation to capture the diverse nature of these regimes and maintaining conceptual validity by avoiding conceptual stretching, which occurs when the concept of democracy is applied to cases where it is not fully appropriate. To address these challenges, scholars have employed several strategies of conceptual innovation. These include creating "diminished" subtypes of democracy, which are incomplete instances of democracy and help avoid conceptual stretching; "precising" the definition of democracy by adding defining attributes to better capture the essence of democracy; and shifting the overarching concept of democracy to a more general category, such as "regime" or "state," to introduce new analytic categories and provide finer differentiation. The authors also discuss the trade-offs among these strategies, noting that while some strategies can achieve both goals, others can only achieve one or the other. They emphasize the importance of scholars being self-conscious about the analytic and normative implications of their choices and the need to avoid "definitional gerrymandering," where new definitions are introduced frequently to accommodate anomalous cases. Overall, the article provides a comprehensive overview of the complex structure of conceptual innovations in the study of recent democratization, highlighting the need for clarity and consistency in the use of concepts to enhance the understanding of democratic processes and outcomes.