1995
Justifying Democracy
Robert A. Dahl
I was born in 1915 in a small town in Iowa: most of
the people in and around my town were farmers.
My father was a doctor. His father's parents had been
farmers in North Dakota, to which they had immigrated
from Norway. My mother, on the other hand, was of
English and Scottish ancestry; I am in some ways a
rather typical American "melting pot" mixture.
Although I did not give much thought to these mat-
ters when I was growing up, later I realized that they
surely must have influenced, perhaps subtly, my views
of the world. For example, earlier than most others in
American political science, I became interested in the
smaller European democracies, whose history and
politics had been largely ignored. In editing Political
Positions in Western Europe I made sure to include
chapters on countries like Norway, Sweden, and Aus-
tria. In doing so I formed enduring friendships with
the late Stein Rokkan in Norway and Hans Daalder in
the Netherlands, and, together with the late Val Lorwin,
an American historian who specialized in Belgium and
France, we collaborated for some years on an effort to
stimulate research and writing on the smaller Euro-
pean democracies.
When I was ten we moved to Alaska, where my
father became the physician for a railroad that ran
north into Yukon Territory in Canada. Growing up in
a small Alaskan town had a powerful impact in many
w a y s - - I ' l l mention only several. For one thing, it
left me with a deep and enduring love of mountains
and the sea. Fly-fishing for trout in wilderness areas
in the Rocky Mountains is still one of my greatest
passions.
Second: living in a small village surrounded by
mountains on three sides and the sea on the other,
cut off from the rest of the world in the winter except
for the occasional boat delivering supplies, one comes
to know the people around you extremely well. Al-
most every person becomes a highly concrete, very
specific individual, with concrete and specific quali-
ties. In that situation I learned to respect human be-
ings without romanticizing them either individually
or collectively.
Third, I learned something--far from enough, I am
afraid--about racial discrimination. About a quarter
of the population were Native Americans, members
of the Tlingit tribe, which had once had a very com-
plex and well functioning culture. They suffered in-
credible social, economic, and cultural discrimination:
They were virtually a racial caste. Though I went to
school with them, sometimes played, hunted, and
fished with them, and often worked side by side with
them during my summers, to my lasting regret I never
wholly broke through the barriers of caste.
Fourth, because every boy in town was expected to
work all summer at whatever work was available, like
some of the other boys I worked as a manual laborer
on the docks and on the railroad. For me, as I well
knew, this condition was not permanent; but for some
of the others, I knew it would be. I acquired sympa-
thy, which I have never wholly lost, for the often hard

and limiting lives of working people. I know that my
writings on economic democracy and the problem of
worker ownership and control originated in those
experiences.
Finally, growing up in small towns must have con-
tributed to my lifelong interest in the problem of scale
in social and political life. A joint product of my inter-
est in scale and in the smaller European democracies
was the book I wrote with the assistance of Edward R.
Tufte, Size and Democracy. I do not think it is an
adequate examination of the subject, and I find the
question still nags me. It resurfaced as a central inter-
pretative theme in Democracy and Its Critics.
I attended the University of Washington in Seattle
because it was closer than any other. Even so, to get
there at that time--before air travel--required a five-
day trip of a thousand miles by boat and meant that I
had to leave home in early September and not return
until June. Then to gain my Ph.D. at Yale l had to
cross the continent by train--another three to four days
of travel. None of this was a hardship: 1 thought of it
rather as an adventure and an opportunity to see some-
thing of North America, including some of its most
spectacularly beautiful parts.
At Yale my aim was not to become a scholar. On
the contrary, I wanted to engage in the far more al-
luring task of changing American public policies, a
possibility that had been dramatically demonstrated
during Franklin D. Roosevell's New Deal. By the
time l arrived in Washington in 1940 with my newly
minted Ph.D., however, the New Deal period was
over and Washington was now focusing on the war
in Europe, and soon in the Pacific. Working in gov-
ernment bureaus engaged in economic mobilization
for the war effort, I learned a great deal about the
possibilities and limits of central economic planning
in a democratic system. Later I was to draw heavily,
if quite indirectly, on these experiences, most fully,
perhaps, in Politics, Economics. and We!fare. writ-
ten with Charles E. Lindblom.
I also learned to my surprise and dismay that ! did
not particularly enjoy being a bureaucrat. The career I
had so eagerly looked forward to at Yale was, I lk)und,
not at all to my liking.
In the winter of 1943 1 entered the U.S. Army, and
in September 1944 i arrived in Europe as leader of a
small reconnaissance platoon in an infantry regiment.
After a fall and winter fighting in the Vosges Moun-
tains and ending up on Victory in Europe day in the
Austrian Alps, I was assigned first in Paris Versailles,
actually--and then in Frankfurt to a unit at Supreme
Headquarters in charge of the Allied occupation of the
JUSTIFYING DEMOCRACY / 387
American sector of Germany. It was assumed, I sup-
pose, that my Ph.D. in government would be of some
utility during the occupation. The unit to which ! was
assigned was mainly preoccupied with the task of de-
Nazifying the German banking s y s t e m - - a t which 1
believe they were only partly successful. However,
from my point of view I had already done my share in
the war. 1 had a wife and two children at home, and
thanks to my combat experience I was allowed to re-
turn home by the end of 1945.
My military experience had profound and lasting
effects on my outlook; I will, however, mention only
two here. First, coming to know my comrades with
the intimacy and solidarity that, alas, men might only
be able to gain in combat, my respect for the qualities
of "'ordinary" human beings was deepened even fur-
ther. I believe that ordinary people have extraordinary
capacities, though I lear these are too often insuffi-
ciently developed.
Second, my military experience provided me with
an incentive for thinking more deeply about what I
wanted out of my life. I now discovered that what I
truly yearned for was a career of scholarship and teach-
ing. By the end of 1945, I had been away trom aca-
demic life fl~r five years and I had published only one
article in 1940 (drawn directly from a chapter in my
Ph.D. dissertation) before the war crowded out such
possibilities. But soon after my return to the United
States I sought oul my earlier mentors at Yale, who
offered me a temporary post at Yale, which in due time
became permanent.
Choosing a life of scholarship and teaching, and
remaining at Yale to pursue them, were among the best
decisions 1 ever made. I am fairly sure that I could not
have been as happy or productive in any other career,
and Ik)l- me Yale has been a marvelous place at which
to teach and write.
The Development of a Problem-Oriented Style
I shall try to resist the impulse to make my intellec-
tual and political evolution more coherent than it prob-
ably was. In this spirit I want to say that 1 never set
out to become a "democratic theorist.'" Even the term
"democratic theory" hardly existed when I began writ-
ing. 1 would say that my work has been probh, m-ori-
ented. A problem, some question with theoretical and
empirical relevance and often of moral importance as
well, would present itself to me. A piece of work might
lbllow, during which I might reshape the initial for-
mulaiion of the problem or question. Some of my
books--Who Governs ?: DelllOCl'aCv alld PoweF ill an
American Cio', for example--quite literally begin with
388 / SOCIETY 9 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1998
a question, and in all of them, I think, I state the prob-
lem in the first chapter.
My first book, Congress and Foreign Policy (1950),
focused critically on the problem of how the U.S. Con-
gress dealt with and should deal with foreign policy.
That book was really a venture in "democratic theory,"
though I probably would not have put it that way in
1950. Politics, Economics, and Welfare was a response
to the need, as Lindblom and 1 saw it, to re-create a
modern "political economy," after the late-nineteenth-
century divorce of neoclassical economics and politi-
cal science. Scholars who specialized on politics were
(and too often still are) woefully ignorant of economic
theory, and neoclassical economists were (and too
many still are) ignorant about and disdainful of politi-
cal life. It was in that book, by the way, that we intro-
duced the term " p o l y a r c h y ' - - a n existing but rarely
used term in English--and formulated an early ver-
sion of what was later to become a more elaborate
theory of polyarchy.
It often happened that in one work I would ignore
or set aside, sometimes explicitly, an important ques-
tion that would later challenge me to undertake an-
other work. And so it went, from one problem or
question to another. In democratic theory everything
is in some way connected with everything else. I do
not know when I began to see that almost everything I
did was in some respects a problem in "democratic
theory." Others may have labeled me a "democratic
theorist" before I felt comfortable with that term. Even
A Preface to Democratic Theoo,, where I first used
the term in a publication, was quite explicitly only a
prefitce, an exploration of certain problems I felt were
not adequately dealt with in existing treatments. At
that time I had no intention of trying to work out a
comprehensive theory to which, at best, the book might
be a preface.
Having said all this, I must also add that I see more
consistency in my work, taken as a whole, than some
of my readers evidently do. I do not regard intellec-
tual consistency over a long life as necessarily a vir-
tue. Indeed, at times I feel almost embarrassed when I
consider how many of the major themes and orienta-
tions in my later work were already present in my com-
pleted Ph.D. dissertation!
Let me mention some of the themes that 1 first de-
veloped in my dissertation. (1) I first worked out some
explicit criteria for a democratic political system. To
be sure, it was to take me many years before I was
able to construct a theoretical framework that seemed
to me to provide satisfactorily tbr the historical, nor-
mative, and empirical aspects of democracy. But I had
already begun that task in my dissertation. (2) I con-
cluded that Marxism was unsatisfactory as an eco-
nomic and political theory and completely inadequate
as an ethical theory. (3) I rejected Leninism and the
idea of the vanguard party as fundamentally antidemo-
cratic. (4) I was charmed by the associational and co-
operative systems portrayed by some of the utopian
socialists. Here the attractions for me of small-scale
communities show up again. Unfortunately, their so-
lutions seemed to me, well, utopian. (5) 1 concluded
that although social democrats and democratic social-
ists often were admirably committed to political de-
mocracy, they were fatally mistaken in their attraction
to state-ownership of industry and their ignorance of
and disdain for the central importance of markets as a
means of allocating resources and setting economy.
(6) Thanks largely to the writings of Oscar Lange, A.
R Lerner, and several other economists, I decided that
the only solution for a socialist economy in a demo-
cratic political system would be a form of market-so-
cialism. The specific solution I proposed became my
first published article, in 1940. Later I came to feel
that the details of that solution were unsatisfactory.
Although 1 have searched for a feasible alternative--
A Pr@tce to Economic Democ~z~c3' contains my later
formulation--I am now inclined to believe that there
may be no single satisfactory solution but perhaps an
array of possibilities suitable in specific situations in
different countries.
An Eclecticism of Style
I find it both fascinating and puzzling that even some
friendly critics, see A Preface to Democratic Theory
and Who Governs? as somehow at odds with my other
work. I do not. Obviously I would not write those books
the same way today, but I think that is true of every-
thing I have ever written. A later version of an earlier
work would not necessarily be better, but it would
surely be different. One reason 1 have never wanted to
revise A Pre/~tce is that it seems to me wonderfully
compact, succinct, clear--I would like to say elegant
in its simplicity! A revision that would mar that would
almost surely not be an improvement.
Some readers of my work may not fully appreciate
that different problems require different methodolo-
gies or a different mix of methodologies. I have never
felt that any particular methodology or approach is
inherently superior to others. What is best depends on
the question, the problem. Historical, behavioral, quan-
titative, linguistic, moral-ethical, and institutional
methods and approaches all have a place, though not
necessarily in the same work. Methodologically speak-

ing, I am deliberately and shamelessly eclectic. 1 be-
lieve strongly that the question one wants to investi-
gate should dictate the choice of methodology; a
methodology should never dictate the choice of
question.
1 also think that my map of the world, its limits,
and its possibilities has always been different from
the standard ideological maps, whether drawn by the
left, liberals, conservatives, neoconservatives, or neo-
liberals. After a lecture in Denmark on economic de-
mocracy, to my amusement I was actually described
in one newspaper as an anarchist! Some readers who
expect that my map ought to fit with theirs are disap-
pointed when it does not. What to them is inconsis-
tency, however, does not necessarily seem so to me:
we are just operating with different cognitive maps.
The Pursuit of Democratization
The values that justify democracy are human, not
parochial. Take moral autonomy and responsibility,
for example. I think any human being is a better per-
son for having the opportunity and ability to reflect
on the relative worth, desirability, or goodness of the
choices he or she confronts and then acting responsi-
bly to bring about what is best. Some important
choices--collective choices, in particular--are best
made in consultation with the other persons involved
and in accordance with just principles for making col-
lective decisions. Democracy is the only political sys-
tem that can fully meet this test, even though in practice
it often fails to.
In practice, democratic systems have always fallen
considerably short of the criteria and values that jus-
tify democracy. So one challenge laced by those of us
who believe in democratic ends is to discover ways of
improving the performance of actual democracies. In
addition, the conditions necessary for the existence of
a democratic political system--the control over mili-
tary and police by freely elected officials, for ex-
a m p l e - a r e simply lacking in many parts of the world.
Thus another and different challenge is to encourage
the development of conditions that would facilitate
democratization. Unfortunately, 1 do not think there is
a general answer to this question. Indeed, in some parts
of the world democratization may simply not be at-
tainable, or at any rate we on the outside may be un-
able to do anything to promote it, except, perhaps, to
make our own political life in democratic countries
more exemplary.
Moral and political relativists may contend that if
the people of a country choose to be governed by a non-
democratic regime, their choice of a political system is
JUSTIFYING DEMOCRACY / 389
as valid as any other. But this is paradoxical and ulti-
mately nonsensical. For people cannot truly choose how
they are to be governed unless they have the opportuni-
ties, rights, privileges, and institutions provided by de-
mocracy. People in a democracy can choose to be
governed by authoritarian rulers, although in fact they
rarely do. But once they have made that choice, they
can no longer easily reverse it. I am very skeptical of
attempts to justify an authoritarian or pseudodemocratic
regime by arguing from the obvious fact that some coun-
tries have never successfully established democracy to
the conclusion that "'Western" democracy is culturally
unsuitable for the people of some particular country. It
is one thing to say that for people who have lived under
authoritarian regimes ik~r generations it may be diffi-
cult, even impossible in the short term, to develop a
democratic culture strong enough to sustain democracy.
But it is quite another, and simply foolish, to say thal
they have in any meaningful sense chosen to remain
under an authoritarian regime.
The Development of Democracy
Because all of us are to some extent blinded by our
own cultural assumptions, I doubt whether it would be
profitable tbr me to try to identify the more specifically
American characteristics and limitations o l m y thought.
It is certainly true, though, that 1 am on the one hand
hopeful about the possibilities of achieving desirable
changes and on the other highly skeptical about
proposals lot sudden, large-scale, comprehensive struc-
tural transformations. If that is an "American" perspec-
tive, so be it.
The possibility and desirability of an abrupt revo-
lutionary transformation of both human beings and the
basic structures of their society, to be achieved if need
be by violence, was surely one of the most mislead-
ing, destructive, and self-defeating myths of the past
century-and-a-half. It was a myth constructed initially
out of a distorted interpretation of the French Revolu-
tion and augmented after 1917 by a fundamental mis-
interpretation of the meaning of the Bolshevik
Revohltion.
Intellectuals played no minor role in helping to
produce the failures that inevitably followed such a
profound misunderstanding of human limits and
possibilities.
I am not a pacifist, and I do not say that violence is
never necessary or never.iustified. Consider the Ameri-
can Civil War--perhaps more costly in human lives
than any preceding war in modern times. If the only
aim and outcome of that war had been to keep the
southern states from seceding and thereby dividing the
390 / S O C I E T Y 9 J A N U A R Y / F E B R U A R Y 1998
United States into two separate countries, I do not be-
lieve the northern prosecution of the Civil War would
have been justified. I do believe, however, that the
abolition of slavery in the United States did finally
justify the American Civil War.
Yet one should always be pessimistic about how
much change for the good is likely to result from vio-
lence. The American Civil War ended slavery, but it
did not free the ex-slaves from generations of oppres-
sion, wretchedness, and harsh discrimination.
In democratic countries, important structural
changes can be and have been achieved by peaceful
incremental changes. To be sure, the increments are
sometimes pretty substantial, and the political con-
flicts necessary to achieve them can be impassioned.
But over time--decades or generations--the result-
ing changes in attitudes, behaviors, practices, struc-
tures, and relations can be enormous. Compare
Sweden in 1930, say, with the Sweden of 1980. Even
if present discontent with the economic burdens of
the welfare state result in some reductions in services,
Sweden will never return to 1930. Nor will other
democratic countries.
It is true that incremental changes in democratic
countries have not replaced certain deeply embedded
social and economic structures. Market capitalism has
not been abolished in any democratic country. Yet the
market capitalism that Marx knew has been peace-
fully transformed by democratic means into a far more
humane and decent economic order than perhaps even
he envisioned.
I see no reason for believing that the process of so-
cioeconomic change, nor, certainly, of cultural change,
has ended. No democratic country--and certainly no
nondemocratic country--has created a set of social,
economic, and political arrangements that achieve a
satisfactory standard of liberty, justice, democracy, se-
curity, and decency. The visible gap between what is
and what ought to be, tempered by what could be, will
continue to drive the search for alternative solutions.
Lest I be misunderstood, perhaps I should add what
seems to me obvious: In democratic countries--as of
course elsewhere--the values and goals I advocate and
that I hope will prevail will always be strongly con-
tested. I have no great confidence that they will nec-
essarily predominate, but they will certainly succumb
if those who believe in these goals fail to support them
as best they can.
On Limits and Opportunities
My interest in the possibilities of a more system-
atic analysis of power no doubt had several sources.
First, it was perfectly clear that power is a central con-
cept and phenomenon in nearly all aspects of life--
politics, social relations, and economics. Second,
systematic treatments were rare and incomplete. I
found Thomas Hobbes's treatment extraordinarily im-
pressive. I profited greatly from Max Weber's formu-
lations, which I thought were a major breakthrough. I
learned a great deal from my colleague Harold
Lasswell's attempts to formulate precise definitions
and categories for distinguishing and describing power,
authority, and influence.
Yet I was dismayed by the casual and undiscrimi-
nating way in which most social scientists, including
political scientists, employed the term "power," ig-
noring the complexities of the concept as if somehow
these complexities were trivial. It was as if physicists
were to go on discussing "forces" and "matter" with-
out any further refinement. I was also intrigued by the
poverty of systematic empirical studies that were con-
ceptually and methodologically sophisticated. In
1955-56 I spent much of my year at the Center for
Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo
Alto trying to clarify the dimensions of the concept
and thinking out how one might actually study it em-
pirically. I believe, too, that before leaving I had al-
ready decided to try to do an empirical study of power
in New Haven.
When I returned to Yale I began the research on
New Haven that was to eventuate in Who Governs?,
in which I was greatly helped by three young Ph.D.
candidates at Yale, Nelson Polsby, R a y m o n d
Wolfinger, and William Flanigan. If I were writing the
book today, however, it would be very different, for
several reasons. First, the city itself has changed: The
white population has diminished, the nonwhite popu-
lation is approaching half of the total, and the number
of poor people is far greater. The problems of race and
poverty are incomparably more severe and daunting
than they were in 1950. Second, I am more sensitive
to the limits on what a city can achieve because of
economic and political structures beyond its control.
When I studied New Haven, the subsidies available
for cities from the federal government were plenti-
f u l - a t least for some purposes, like redevelopment--
and New Haven's astute political leaders were able to
gain more than their share, Skilled and unskilled work-
ers could still find jobs in local industries. Under these
conditions, creative political leadership could make a
difference, What local leaders could not do, and what
I failed to take sufficiently into account, was to over-
come the deep and persistent problems that would in
later years be caused by extensive inner-city poverty,

the decline of manufacturing jobs, the shrinking of
federal funds, the growth of crime, and increased so-
cial disintegration.
I have sometimes thought that if I were to under-
take a study like Who Governs? today, I would want
to say much more about the question of limits and
opportunities. Perhaps my interest in that matter has
to do with the process of aging. In any case, l now
think more than I once did about how all life is given
structure and meaning by its limits and opportunities,
by the opportunities available within those limits, and
the way those opportunities are seized or lost.
Though I think Who Gover, s? was largely a valid
portrayal of the politics of the city at the time, seen in
the perspective of today's New Haven and of compa-
rable cities elsewhere, what I portrayed would be too
optimistic today. In the next year or so, my colleague
Douglas Rae will, I hope, publish a book about New
Haven as it is today, a book I expect to be of unusual
originality, both in substance and methodology. From
what I have already seen of it, his book will probe the
problem of poverty in New Haven and other compa-
rable cities far more deeply than ! did or than anyone
else has to my knowledge.
Whether political leadership in the city, the state,
and the nation will respond to the fairly modest and
realistic proposals he will make is, however, doubt-
ful. Consequently I fear the acute problems of inner-
city poverty and social disintegration will remain with
us for many years to come.
The Inevitability of Inequality
I think both the economic system and the struc-
ture and operation of American politics inhibit efforts
to reduce social, economic, and political inequality.
It is inherent in a modern, privately-owned market
economy--market capitalism, if you like--that it will
generate inequalities: in incomes, wealth, status,
skills, information, and access to communications,
and thus in power, influence, and authority. I do not
mean that the dynamics of a modern market economy
make it more inegalitarian than other historical sys-
tems. I only mean that it, like the others, does loster
inequalities. These can be mitigated to some extent
by government policies supported by effective po-
litical forces. The Scandinavian countries have car-
ried these efforts about as far as it may be possible to
go without creating economic consequences that vot-
ers will find intolerable.
Despite a very strong strain of social egalitarian-
ism in American culture, in the United States we have
done much less to reduce inequalities like those ! men-
JUSTIFYING DEMOCRACY / 391
tioned than, say, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. One
of the many reasons for this is the nature of the Ameri-
can political system, which makes it easier for inter-
est groups to interpose a veto on policies than for
political leaders to form and maintain a coalition ca-
pable of introducing changes. Another reason is the
conflict between the egalitarian element of American
ideology and other elements that run counter to it. In
addition, the size and heterogeneity of the country--
geographic, ethnic, racial, and ideological--make coa-
lition-building extremely difficult. The New Deal
coalition that Franklin Roosevelt put together in the
middle of the Great Depression was a rarity, and it
ultimately collapsed.
Although theory and evidence are inconclusive, I
am convinced that the global economy makes it more
difficult to devise and enact redistributive policies.
Even in a country as large as the United States, we
can no longer make economic policy by taking only
domestic factors into account. I doubt whether we ever
shall be able to do so again.
Political Systems
The difficulties I have already mentioned in form-
ing effective coalitions for change have been greatly
increased by the disintegration of American politi-
cal parties as relatively cohesive electoral organiza-
tions. The parties have disintegrated into associations
of individual political entrepreneurs, each with his
or her own organization and financing. The parties
do remain surprisingly cohesive (by American, not
European standards) as legislative parties within Con-
gress. But Congress is at the limits of its capacities
for coordination. Too much now depends on the presi-
dent. And as 1 have already said, building a stable
coalition for change is difficult, as is all too clear
from President Bill Clinton's effort to induce Con-
gress to adopt a comprehensive system of national
health care.
I am not sure that the American political system
provides a better solution than do some European
democratic systems to the problem of the potential
conflict between global interests and constituency in-
terests. Among the countries in which democratic in-
stitutions have existed intact since 1950, the American
presidential system is unique. Incidentally, one might
better call it the presidential-congressional system,
because probably no other national legislature in the
world is as influential as the U.S. Congress.
I am inclined to be much more critical than my
American colleagues of our presidential-congressional
system. It seems to me to have few comparative ad-
392 / S O C I E T Y 9 J A N U A R Y / F E B R U A R Y 1998
vantages and some important disadvantages. As my
colleague Juan Linz and his collaborators show in their
important new book, The Faihtre o f Presidential De-
mocracy, outside the United States, particularly in
Latin America, the presidential system has worked
badly, perhaps in some cases even contributing to
breakdowns in democratic government. In the United
States itself, our presidential-congressional system is
not, in my view, working very well. In any case, I do
not see that we have a better solution than do other
countries to the problem.
Although enlarging the boundaries of a political
system may make it more effective in dealing with
problems of importance to citizens--defense, envi-
ronmental issues, and trade, for example--the larger
political system will also be more remote from citi-
zens, less accessible, and less participatory. The Eu-
ropean parliament in Strasbourg will never be as
democratically responsive and responsible as the na-
tional parliament of, say, Denmark, or even of the
United Kingdom. And the bureaucracies in Brussels
will be even less so. There is, then, an inevitable
trade-off between the greater effectiveness gained for
the political system by enlarging it, and the effec-
tiveness of citizens as participants in the political life
of that larger system. I do not have an overarching
answer to that dilemma. If I were a Norwegian, how-
ever, I would be strongly tempted to vote against entry
into the European Union on precisely that ground.
Luckily for me, it is up to the Norwegians, not me,
to decide that question.
SUGGESTED FURTHER READING
Robert A. Dahl and Charles E. Lindblom. Politics,
Economics, and We!fitre. New Brunswick, N.J.:
Transaction Publishers, 1993 (originally published
in 1953).
Robert A. Dahl. A Pr<filce to Democratic Theory.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956.
Robert A. Dahl. Who Governs? Democra~ T and Power in
an American City. New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1961.
Robert A. Dahl. Polvarehv: ParticipatioH and Opposition.
New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1971.
Robert A. Dahl and Edward R. Tuft. Size and Democracy.
Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1973.
Robert A. Dahl. A Prt+~tce to Economic Democracy.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1985.
Robert A. Dahl. Democracy and Its Critics. New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989.
Robert A. Dahl is Sterliltg Professor of Political Sci-
ence at Yale University. In addition to the titles listed in
the Jitrther readings, he has written many other works, in-
eluding Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy aml Democracy,
Liberty and EquaLity.
[Cltrrent q/.l'iliation: Yale UnivetwiO']