Data from 85 societies worldwide show that the supply and demand of democracy are dramatically more congruent when one substantiates supply and demand measures by genuine commitments to democracy’s defining freedoms. Using substantiated measures of both democratic supplies and demands, regression analyses suggest that congruence emerges from a statistically independent effect of prior democratic demands on subsequent democratic supplies. Using multi-level models, we examine the mechanisms behind this effect. We find, first, that substantive demands for democracy arise in response to an increasing utility of freedoms, irrespective of the prior existence of democracy. Second, we find that substantive democratic demands have expressive utility and hence nurture expressive mass actions that make these demands felt, irrespective of repression. The utility logic guiding these mechanisms makes democratizing mass pressures possible. We conclude that the perspective of “substantive democracy” is useful to evidence and understand a classic theme in political science: democratic congruence.