"Polyarchy was a term that I think had been developed in the eighteenth century, as you know from the Greek meaning “many rulers” (poly; archon). I came to the conclusion early on that we should not keep trying to use the word democracy in both its ideal and in its realistic sense, particularly given the actual democracies that had evolved, with representation and the growth of political parties and a whole new species, a whole new different kind of political system. We needed, then, to modify our language, so that we could describe democracy as an ideal, using the term democracy there, but we needed a term—it never actually became a household term, but we needed a term that described actual eighteenth-, nineteenth-, twentieth-century democracies. And I stumbled on the word polyarchy and started applying that. As I say, it didn’t become the term, and I do think it’s still confusing that the term applies to both, but I think we’re a little bit more comfortable now, perhaps, than we were in making sure which it is that we’re talking about, and when we use the word democracy, whether we’re talking about smallscale democracy, large-scale democracy, polyarchy as I would call it, multi-party democracy, a whole, much more diverse, much more complex..."