The last component is to guarantee the plausibility of the democratic political system, along with providing necessary condition for effective participation and competition.

As a minimalist definition for democratic regimes, this paper defines democracy as follows:

Democratic regimes are political systems in which top offices are attainable through public elections open to all citizens with potentially equal opportunity, and where a minimum set of citizens rights and liberties guaranteed for all citizens.

The more frequent and free a political system provides opportunity for its citizens to stand for elections to attain political offices, the more democratic it is. The more effective the equal opportunity a regime provides for its citizens, the more democratic it is. The more sufficient the set of citizens rights and liberties a government provides for its citizens, the more democratic it is. Thus, democracies can be classified as high quality and low quality democracies.

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On the other hand, since according to various ideologies, giving substance to the general unspecified conception of democracy, different collections of rights and liberties, as well as different regulations for competition for attaining political offices are provided in any given society, there can be different forms of democracy with various justifications. Hence, Western liberal capitalist democracies are not necessarily the only plausible and justifiable form of democracy.

A particular attention should be drawn to the relationship between religion and democracy. It seems that democracy neither in its ideal conception nor in its actual crystallization should be conceived as being necessarily secular and irreconcilable with religion. Whether a democracy is secular or religious rests on the accompanying ideology to which a given association has subscribed. If the accompanying ideology of an association

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