From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Robert Alan Dahl (b. 17 December 1915), is the Sterling Professor emeritus of political science at Yale University. He is past president of the American Political Science Association and one of the most distinguished political scientists writing today. Dahl has often been described as "the Dean" of American political scientists. He earned this title by his prolific writing output and the fact that scores of prominent political scientists studied under him.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he was involved in a landmark dispute with C. Wright Mills over the nature of politics in the United States. Mills held that America's governments are in the grasp of a unitary and demographically narrow power elite. Dahl responded that there are many different elites involved, who have to work both in contention and in compromise with one another. If this is not democracy in a populist sense, Dahl contended, it is at least polyarchy (or pluralism). In perhaps his best known work, Who Governs? (1961), he examines the power structures (both formal and informal) in the town of New Haven, Connecticut, as a case study, and finds that it supports this view. (His conclusions have been challenged by other researchers; most notably by G. William Domhoff.)

In more recent years, Dahl's writings have taken on a more pessimistic tone. In How Democratic Is the American Constitution? (2001) he argued that the constitution is much less democratic than it ought to be given that its authors were operating from a position of "profound ignorance" about the future. However, he adds that there is little or nothing that can be done about this "short of some constitutional breakdown, which I neither foresee nor, certainly, wish for."

In another landmark book, Democracy and Its Critics (1989), Dahl makes his view about democracy clear. No modern country meets the ideal of democracy, which is as a theoretical utopia. To reach the ideal requires meeting 5 criteria:

1. Effective Participation
2. Voting Equality at the Decisive Stage
3. Enlightened Understanding
4. Control of the Agenda
5. Inclusiveness

Instead, he calls politically advanced countries "polyarchies." Polyarchies have elected officials, free and fair elections, inclusive suffrage, rights to run for office, freedom of expression, alternative information and associational autonomy. Those institutions are a major advance in that they create multiple centers of political power.

He was awarded the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science in 1995.

• Sociologist G. William Domhoff strongly disagrees with Dahl's view of power in New Haven, CT in the 1960s: "Who Really Ruled in Dahl's New Haven?"
• Political philosopher Charles Blattberg has criticized Dahl's attempt to define democracy with a set of necessary and sufficient conditions. See Blattberg, From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics: Putting Practice First, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, ch. 5. ISBN 0-19-829688-6.

The most well-known of Dahl's works include:

• 1956 - A Preface to Democratic Theory
• 1961 - Who Governs?: Democracy and Power in an American City
• 1972 - Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition
• 1983 - Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy: Autonomy vs. Control
• 1985 - A Preface to Economic Democracy
• 1989 - Democracy and Its Critics
• 1998 - On Democracy
• 2002 - How Democratic Is the American Constitution?
• 2006 - On Political Equality

• http://elsinore.cis.yale.edu/polisci/people/rdahl.html
• Personal homepage
• List of articles written from 1940 to 1998 (PDF)
• List of articles written from 1998 on (PDF)