democratiser BrE
democratizer AmE

If he becomes an out-and-out democratiser who does all he can to break up the more corrupt sectors of Russian society - he will win back all that lost support.

It is also a democratiser - by facilitating the adoption of e-books, the barriers to any of us publishing have been significantly lowered & the previous middle-men significantly marginalised.

Frozen food can be a great democratizer.

Speaking of the democracy of New York, perhaps the greatest democratizer in this city is the subway.

But for spreading the message that put Mr. Lang at the forefront of fashion, the computer is the great democratizer.

His "Science as Democratizer", featured in American Scientist magazine, argued how the scientific way of thinking can influence global society.

He was a rather equivocal democratizer, declaring in 1942 that he had not become "the King's first minister in order to liquidate the British Empire."

The first commoner to reach the White House, Jackson was essentially elected as a democratizer to complete the Revolution begun by Virginia planters.

"Wrestling is not only a great character-builder, but a democratizer," adds Mr. Pluta, who received a college wrestling scholarship from Miami of Ohio.

Mr. Powell, a determined democratizer, relentlessly mocked his fellow clerics, accusing them of hypocrisy and "churchianity," and ridiculing all pretensions on the basis of income, or background, or skin tone.

Including Israeli Arabs, who are not required to serve, about 45 percent of 18-year-olds don't enlist in the army - the institution that is supposed to be the great democratizer and equalizer of Israeli life.

One of Baghi's colleagues, Ali Reza Alavi-Tabar, who also began as a radical Islamist and wound up a democratizer, told me that, yes, people in Iran will be happy if Saddam's regime falls.

Since food, like death, is an ultimate democratizer, linking the high tables of kings and queens to the grub of the lowest beggarly slave, food is our common language, in which form is as revealing as content.

Some citizens, perhaps 100,000 or more, also had the good sense to hold a political protest rally as the best way of salvaging something from one of the most tense and sorry days of Mr. Gorbachev's spotted career as a democratizer.

Vilnius Hurt Gorbachev Mr. Gorbachev's reputation as a would-be democratizer was tattered last month when he defended the use of Soviet tanks in Vilnius, where 15 unarmed people died in the streets as they demonstrated for Lithuanian independence.

Perhaps more than any other institution in the city, the trains are the great democratizer, where the maid and stockbroker sit side by side, sharing in the advertisements for relief for hemorrhoids and the tales of woe spun by bedraggled panhandlers.

The story of Baghi's millimeter evolution from Islamist revolutionary to tempered democratizer offers a window on an alternative way forward in the Middle East, a method and a movement that welcomes external influence but does not want the United States military to midwife its democracy.

But to Lithuanians along Zalgiro Street it was more of an appeal to memory, and an odd one at that, from Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the post-Stalinist democratizer who finds himself stirring dark recollections of forced annexation as he fights to maintain his national union.