This chapter discusses Sartori’s theory of democracy. Sartori was one of the main proponents of the competitive theory of democracy, which he set in opposition to the ‘participatory’ theory of democracy, which he asserted did not consider the difference between the democracy of antiquity and modern-day democracy. The competitive theory of democracy is a descriptive (empirical) theory that explains how democracies actually work. However, Sartori stressed that descriptive theory alone is not enough; we also need a prescriptive (normative) theory of democracy. For Sartori, it was characteristic that he was primarily interested in the problems of democracy, while his definitions of democracy are less important. Indeed, he was a great advocate of democracy and worried about its fate. Sartori strongly rejected so-called democracies with qualifiers (e.g., popular democracy, national democracy, etc.), which he considered mere façades of democracy, behind which some form of dictatorship is concealed. The only exception in his view was liberal democracy, and he devoted considerable attention to it because it was democracy in the true sense of the word. Liberal democracy is democracy as such because only the combination of liberalism and democracy will lead to a liberal constitutional state, which is the only effective application of democracy in practice. For natural reasons, Sartori could not participate in the debate on the current ‘democratic backsliding.’ In his time, however, he did not shy away from the question of the future of democracy. Sartori linked the danger of democracy to three phenomena—homo videns, multiculturalism, and environmental destruction.