  The democracy of quark flavors is a well-motivated flavor symmetry, but it
must be properly broken in order to explain the observed quark mass spectrum
and flavor mixing pattern. We reconstruct the texture of flavor democracy
breaking and evaluate its strength in a novel way, by assuming a parallelism
between the Q=+2/3 and Q=-1/3 quark sectors and using a nontrivial
parametrization of the flavor mixing matrix. Some phenomenological implications
of such democratic quark mass matrices, including their variations in the
hierarchy basis and their evolution from the electroweak scale to a
superhigh-energy scale, are also discussed.
