Robert A. Dahl

Robert A. Dahl (b. 1915), is a Sterling professor emeritus of political science at Yale University, a past president of the American Political Science Association and one of the most distinguished poilitical scientists writing today. In the 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 int he 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. In more recent years, Dahl's writings have taken on a more pessimistic tone. In How Democratic is the American Constitution (2002) he argued that the constitution is much less democratic than it ought to be and 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."