It’s both an informative and amusing review. An excerpt:

Herman Cappelen’s densely argued but eminently readable and engaging The Concept of Democracy…argues that the words “democracy” and “democratic” (what he calls the “D-words”) are so semantically, pragmatically, and communicatively defective that we should abandon them altogether. His book is not an argument against democracy but an argument against “democracy” (2). The Concept of Democracy is not a book of political philosophy but rather a work of philosophy of language applied to a political concept. Cappelen offers no arguments for or against free elections, representative government, or political equality. His quarrel is with a word that, among other failings, has become an empty vessel into which speakers pour whatever ideological content suits their purposes….

Cappelen catalogues a heterogenous array of phenomena that get labeled “democratic”: voting procedures, constitutional structures, workplace arrangements, classroom pedagogies, and more. He notes that “democracy” functions as a count noun (“a democracy”) while “democratic” functions as a highly gradable adjective (“more democratic”, “less democratic”, “truly democratic”). The word’s extension—the things out there it refers to—is radically unstable. Historically, “democracy” was a term of abuse denoting the corrupt form of rule by the many; today it has become an honorific, often applied promiscuously to whatever the speaker endorses (64)….

Chapter 7 argues that the D-words are semantically defective. Cappelen notes that both ordinary language and scholarly works tend to alternate between liberal, overly inclusive definitions and demanding, overly strict definitions. Liberal definitions of “democracy” set the bar so low they include sham democracies and authoritarian regimes that hold meaningless votes. Demanding definitions set the bar so high that no actual polity qualifies. Ordinary discourse vacillates between these poles. We say, “The United States is a democracy” (liberal definition) and then immediately add “but it’s not a real democracy” (demanding definition). Note that throughout the book, Capellen also criticizes operationalized definitions, e.g., Freedom House or the Economist’s Intelligence Unit, as parochial, question-begging, or overly focused on particulars….

Instead of asking whether a country is “democratic” in some vague descriptive sense, we can ask more specific and informative questions: Does it have universal suffrage? How are votes aggregated into representation? Is there judicial review? How is power distributed among branches? Are civil liberties protected? If we mean to ask normative questions, we should simply ask those: Should political decisions involve deliberation of a certain sort? Should we give greater weight to the votes of those who care more, know more, or are more affected? How should individual preferences be aggregated into collective choices (135)? Rather than debating which answers to these questions count as “most democratic”, we should answer the questions directly….

The meanings of words, he insists, are fixed by patterns of social use and historical forces beyond any individual theorist’s power to stipulate. We cannot simply fix the D-words by fiat.

Part V addresses objections. The most prominent is the “moral high ground” worry: If we abandon “democracy,” do we thereby surrender a powerful rallying cry to autocrats? Cappelen replies that the word’s vagueness is precisely what allows figures like Orbán or Putin to hijack it. Precision, he argues, is a better defense than a slogan that can mean anything.

Cappelen has undoubtedly shown us something many of us have long suspected: “Democracy” is not merely a “contested” concept, as political theorists often say but a genuinely problematic one that generates a great deal of bullshitting (Frankfurt 2005). Nevertheless, I wonder whether the strongest objection to Cappelen’s argument is that the bullshit might be a feature rather than a bug….On this view, “democracy”, “the will of the people”, and similar bullshitty concepts work because they are bullshitty. They are magic words that enable cooperation among individuals and groups with deeply divergent first-order moral commitments (and sometimes with few commitments at all). People can unite under the banner of “democracy” precisely because the term is capricious and underspecified. If each person or faction had to specify exactly which institutional features, policies, or values it was defending, coordination would often collapse. Here the semantic defects of the term are a feature, not a bug, because they are a coordinating mechanism….

This objection does not show that Cappelen’s semantic diagnosis is mistaken. Rather, it suggests that he may underestimate the functional value of imprecise terms, even while he carefully catalogs their costs. “Democracy” may be meaning-defective by philosophical standards, yet valuable as a coordination-enabling concept in real political life—one that creates a useful appearance of legitimacy. Note that this objection, barely sketched here, at most supports caution about abandoning “democracy” in popular and political discourse; it is entirely compatible with Cappelen’s claim that scholarly work would be improved by abandoning it.