Abstract: Nowadays an essential gap between formal democratic institutions and cultural, historical, and value traditions historically peculiar to certain countries/societies can be observed. The phenomenon of democracies conforming to the formal, procedural attributes, but giving rise to doubt in their democratic essence, produced new concepts describing the existing changes which are generally called “democracies with adjectives”. At present this discourse covers more than 60 countries, and the most extensive discussion takes place around the countries of Latin America. The author uses the system, structural-functional and comparative-political approaches, the methods of induction, deduction, analysis, synthesis, observation, modeling, and expert assessments. The article explains the concept of “democracies with adjectives”, describes the problem field of this concept, and the main phases of its establishment, outlines the problem spheres influenced by the democracy discourse, shows the countries involved in this discourse and the strategies of the authors of the concept.