But they live in a noisy, messy democracy, where opportunities and a political voice are open to them, and that makes a huge difference.

You can do it the slow, tortoise way, as Russia did, by trying to build it with a messy democracy.

They seem so much easier to deal with than messy democracies.

The problem, of course, is that dictatorships wind up going to war against their neighbors where the messy democracies find other ways of settling their problems.

South America's last country to abandon military rule, Paraguay is making a bumpy transition from a tidy dictatorship to a messy democracy.

NewsWeek observes India's messy democracy is particularly ill equipped to handle the conflicting pressures of rapid growth and poverty.

The West was suffering from too much messy democracy.

The first real presidential elections were held in 1992 and showed how messy democracy could be.

It is now demonstrating how messy democracy can be with President Joseph Estrada in the midst of an impeachment trial on corruption charges.

Here, the press acted first as the opponents of colonial and then military rule; now, increasingly, newspapers are the watchdogs of a very messy democracy.