No, there is no democracy without certain qualities or characteristics such as fairness, equality, freedom, and justice. These qualities, or adjectives, are essential for a democracy to function properly and for its citizens to have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives. Democracy also requires respect for human rights, the rule of law, the participation of citizens in decision-making, and the accountability of government institutions to the public in order for it to work.

The question of "What democracy is...and is not" (thus the title of an article of the 1990s by Ph. Schmitter and T.L. Karl, then Stanford) is age-old and has been answered differently by different scholars who each have tried to define it. While Dahl's 1971-definition that he suggested on p. 3 of "Polyarchy" is likely the single most prominent one, my personal favorite is by Larry Diamond, Juan Linz and Seymour Lipset (1988/-89) who, in the volume on Africa - I think it is vol. II - of a multi-volume book on "Democracy in Developing Countries", suggested a semantically largely identical version of Dahl's, but which is much more elegant (3 criteria: (1) meaningful competition for all positions of effective governing power; (2) regular voicing of preferences, at least through free and fair elections, in regular intervals and without the use of force, such that no major societal group (of adults) is excluded; (3) a level of guaranteed political rights and civil liberties that is enough to guarantee the integrity of (1) and (2). (This is just the essence, not an exact citation).

Whether or not, however, democracy exists without adjectives refers to an entirely different debate that started in 1997 with an article (research note) in World Politics by David Collier and Steven Levitsky with the title "Democacy with Adjectives". This contains a suggestion that we should resolve the typological issue of ambiguous regimes in the "grey zone" between democracy and authoritarianism which display some of the features of democracy and some of authoritarian regimes, but could be classed neither as full democracies nor as full authoritarian regimes (in their view) by adding adjectives to democracy according to what exactly individual cases lack in comparison to "full" or liberal democracies.

While based on a non-trivial background of theoretical considerations in which they argue we should transfer the practice of "family resemblance" that Wittgenstein had found in people's everyday language usage to how we deal with capturing academic categories such as "democracy".

Others have contested that idea, criticizing that calling countries "democracy" that actually combined many flaws would become a misnomer, so that we'd end up calling clearly non-democratic regimes "democracy", with just some adjective added, which would then constitute a case of "conceptual stretching" (G. Sartori) of the concept of democracy. In other words: The cut-off points of the concept would then become arbitrary and fuzzy so that the concept would, at best, lose its usefulness and, at worst, would lead to an academic Tower of Babel. How many flaws could any single democracy accumulate before it crosses the threshold to a non-democracy? There is no clear answer when we operate with "democracies with adjectives".

Consequently, some scholars argued that such grey-zone regimes should better be captured as non-democratic or: "authoritarian". Accordingly, a literature on "authoritarianisms with adjectives" developed (for instance, Andreas Schedler's notion of "electoral authoritarianism"; Levitsky & Way's notion of "competitive authoritarianism"; or "liberalized authoritarianism" (Brumberg).

Yet other scholars reproached that second group by stating that methodologically, both procedures were essentially identical because the construction of types or classes according to what individual cases of such a class lacked in order to be a full member of it, was both times creating classes by subtracting from definitions that were already known as "minimal" definitions": In their view, that made no sense and was close to illogical.

A third group of scholars found it more helpful to refrain from using such so-called "diminished subtypes" altogether, and instead insert a new category on the same level of abstraction as democracy and authoritarianism (the political regime level), in between the two ("hybrid regimes" ; first by T.L. Karl 1995; later L. Diamond and others more). Yet others had no problems with a lack of logic, but found "diminished subtypes" "not empirically useful" (e.g. Moller & Skaaning's "The radial delusion", 2010).

Thus, the question of whether we think "democracy exists without adjectives" essentially refers to the question which position or viewpoint you take in the debate about regimes with adjectives.

Generally speaking, however, scholars should not mix the normative associations and feelings of sympathy they may (or may not) have about the content of any concept (e.g."democracy") with what a definition for academic purposes is made for: The latter is a different matter and results from the need of finding unanimously agreed upon and unambiguous definitions for concepts we use in order to ensure that scientific communication does not fail.

For the purpose of agreeing on a definition on "democracy", therefore, the question "And is it not undemocratic to insist that everyone in a polity ascribes to just one form of democracy?" does not matter: For any scientific inquiry on democracy, whether as a DV or as an IV, it does not matter what the members of a polity at large normatively think of it; rather, in the academic realm, we better had agree on one definition that is as clear-cut as possible in order to avoid communication failure and misunderstandings. As King/Keohane/Verba classically remind us in their first chapter on "Scientific Inquiry in the Social Sciences": "good science is public", meaning it requires communication and transparency. That is only possible if we refer to the same things by the same words - and it for that reason that Emile Durkheim, in 1924 already when the first edition of his "Les règles de la method sociologique" was published, insisted in Chapter two that the first thing sciences would have to do was to basically cast away everyday language in its entirety and create an artificially unambiguous language for the purpose of achieving the goals of science.