Robert A. Dahl: questions, concepts, proving it

Abstract

What were the ingredients of Robert A. Dahl’s genius as a political scientist? First, he asked good questions. Those were ordinarily bold, broad questions central to political theory that appear at the openings of his works and orient them. Second, he was resourceful in creating or tailoring holistic concepts such as ‘democracy’ and ‘power’, as well as compositional categories such as ‘cumulative’ vs. ‘noncumulative’ resources, or ‘participation’ and ‘contestation’ as routes to democratization. Third, he evangelized for hypothesis testing and reliance on data-sets as the future of political science, and he acted on this advice.

Keywords:

• Dahl
• democracy
• polyarchy
• power
• constitution

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The question cited here appears on the cover of the book as a kind of subtitle, although it is not exactly that.

2. ‘Pluralism’ as term and idea wends its way through Dahl’s work, notably in Who Governs? (1961b), Pluralist Democracy in the United States (1967), Pluralism Revisited (1978), and Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy (1982).

3. Culminating in Democracy and Its Critics (1989).

4. The year of this book’s interview with Dahl was 2002.

5. Dahl discusses drawing on the term ‘polyarchy’ in Dahl and Levi (2009, p. 5). The sideshow quotation is from Dahl (1961b, p. 305).

6. As in Dahl (1957, 1982, ch. 2), Dahl and Stinebrickner (2003, ch. 2).

7. The authors deploy these four categories in respectively chs. 6–13 of Dahl and Lindblom (1976). The phrase ‘reciprocal control among leaders,’ which Dahl also uses in later work, appears at p. 324.

8. These three theories are taken up in respectively chs. 1–3 of Dahl (1956).

9. This theory is pursued in ch. 6 and also at pp. 184–186 of Dahl (1961b), quotation at p. 184.

10. Dahl (1961b, pp. 186–187) left open the possibility that the idea might apply better in other settings such as Congress.

11. As seen in Dahl (1956, chs. 1, 2, 1971, ch. 1).

12. Discussions of the enterprise appear in Dahl (1961b, p. vi and Appendix B), and in Munck and Snyder (2007, p. 139).

13. There are more yet in the book’s appendixes.

14. It makes an appearance directly after the quoted material of the previous paragraph.

15. On the idea as moral imperative: Munck and Snyder (2007, p. 130).

16. See the argument in Gerring (2001, ch. 6).

17. Dahl’s suspicion of judicial review went way back, but it was still lively, if not un-asterisked, in Dahl’s (2002) How Democratic Is the American Constitution?, pp. 152–154.

18. A similar summary judgment appears in Dahl’s (1967, p. 4) American politics text.

19. These judgments about the history come across in Dahl (1967, chs. 2, 3).