Where democracy comes from, the stages by which it develops, the direction it takes, the efforts needed to build it, democracy’s density, and the absence of democratic accountability, all involve conceptual metaphors that imply theories of how democracy emerges and exists as a system of governance. This chapter examines a range of metaphorical concepts and the ways in which they lead scholars to make certain assumptions about democracy, devise hypotheses about processes of democratization, and contribute to theories that offer explanations for how democracy develops over time. The chapter concludes that democratization is not an unambiguous process, but, rather, is most often understood through the same sorts of metaphors that frame the study of other aspects of international relations (IR).