Robert Dahl Political Views
Leida
Robert Dahl, the foremost American political scientist of the post-war era, passed away earlier this month. Bill Kissane looks back at the central role he played in creating the discipline of political science in the United States after the war and his status as the pioneer of democratization studies.
That his most influential books were published across a span of more than three decades suggests one explanation; his creativity and ambition had a consistent focus. His main ambition was to bring clarity and thoroughness to the question of what type of contemporary government now best lives up to the democratic ideal of a people governing themselves. He argued that the ideal type existed somewhere between the elite-dominated systems people on the left claimed were pseudo-democracy, and systems in which the people actually ruled themselves (genuine democracy). His default concept was polyarchy, a system based on the rule of the many, on the basis that it was broader than oligarchy but more workable than the rule of the people.
Dahl later explored the contrast between democratic and non-democratic systems in what became a worldwide comparative research project. His basic insight was that what we call democracy was not produced by people becoming democrats. Only structural transformation (for example, the rise of the nation state and the spread of capitalism) could explain this benevolent apparition. Through this research Dahl also indelibly shaped the study of democratisation in two respects. First he tried to identify the necessary institutional characteristics of polyarchy. He came up with eight institutional freedoms which suggested that contestation (rather than just universal citizenship/inclusiveness) was the historically novel quality of polyarchy. Mapping the dimensions of contestation and inclusiveness over time made it possible to trace the progressive institutionalization of civil disobedience across the globe. Secondly, Dahl incorporated the disciplines of comparative history and sociology into the comparative study of democratisation. Yet Dahl was no crude modernisation theorist; he paid careful attention to specific historical trajectories (for example in Switzerland where the lack of a tradition of military involvement in politics was particularly significant to democratic development).
The combination of political theory and empirical evidence was also applied to his work on the concept of power. Many believed that modern democracies were no exception to the view that all political systems rest on a division of labour between an active political elite and a largely passive majority. Believing this to be simplistic, Dahl posed three empirical tests for its validity: the elite must be identifiable, organised politically, and its preference must consistently prevail over those of others when challenged. Such was his commitment to the testability and operationalisability of social science concepts that we now have a sharper and more robust language with which to describe modern politics.
The combination of theorist and empirical scholar was also suited to his general contribution to democratisation studies. Dahl did not do research abroad; the empirical scholar remained an Americanist. What he did was reflect on the patterns of democratization he saw, consider their origins and consequences theoretically, and leave it to others to carry the subject forward through work on specific regions or cases. Indeed Dahl was the kind of theoretical social scientist that Karl Popper would have approved of. His theories were not based on experiments, or observations. His role rather was to provide very general explanatory frameworks for the patterns of regime change he saw around him. One of the most famous is his observation that high-quality democracies tend to arise when liberalization of a political system precedes the introduction of a mass suffrage. These perspectives loaded the dice against the success of many new democracies.
Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the British Politics and Policy blog, nor of the London School of Economics. Please read our comments policy before posting.
Bill Kissane is a Senior Lecturer in Political Science at the Government Department of the London School of Economics. His research interests lie broadly within the areas of comparative and Irish politics. He is currently working on two books on civil wars and their aftermaths.
Robert A. Dahl's Who Governs? (1961) is a study of New Haven, Connecticut, a coastal city with about 160,000 people in 1960. Located 80 miles east of New York City and 47 miles south of Hartford, the city is best known as the home of Yale University.
Dahl's study was the answer to all that supposedly ailed the social sciences in the 1960s. It refuted Hunter's (1953) claim that a relative handful of business leaders dominated Atlanta, and even more importantly, it "offered analogies with national politics that few other cities could provide" because of its "highly competitive two-party system" (Dahl, 1961, pp. v-vi). The United States is New Haven writ large. The book won a prize as the best book in political science for the year it was published and was one of the most widely cited books in the social sciences for the next 20 years.
In Dahl's view of New Haven in the 1950s, the local upper class was not based in the business community; the business community was passive and not very influential; and Yale University, for all its wealth, was on the periphery of local politics. The downtown business community could often block proposals it disliked which directly affected its economic interests, but it seldom took an initiatory role. When it came to power, the most important arena in New Haven was the political one. It was the mayor and his aides who initiated new programs, then sold their programs to the business community, Yale, and the general populace.
The argument about New Haven in the 1950s, a city seen at the time as evidence for the great future made possible by urban renewal, is especially poignant in terms of how things turned out there. It is now one of the poorest cities in the United States. Yale and its faculty members are islands of increasing privilege and isolation in a sea of misery. Here's how a reporter from Manchester, England, started a story in The Observer in 2002:
The north wind cuts cold and sudden across the historic green of New Haven. It blows through the "tent city" where the homeless huddle. And it blows round the spires and quadrangles of Yale University, one of America's richest Ivy League colleges.
The contrast is stark: Charlene Johnson, three months pregnant, emerges from her bivouac, worrying about the winter that lies between her and her due date. And all around are Yale's stone walls, elegant colonial churches and smart people walking past boutiques and coffee shops, carrying their course books.
"You know what's underneath you?" challenges Rod Cleary, who was released from prison in Los Angeles after a conviction for gang fighting, found but lost a job in New Haven, and has now been evicted. "I'll tell ya: bones. This green was a cemetery once; you're sitting on a pauper's grave. And, man, that's what it's going to be again if we ain't careful."
The contrast this reporter draws between Yale and the poor is more than poetic. Although few Yalies can bring themselves to believe it, Yale contributes significantly to the basic problems caused by deindustrialization. It started taking a large amount of prime downtown land off the tax rolls in the 1920s and 1930s while refusing to give any compensation, just at the time when New Haven was starting to decline as a manufacturing center. In addition, it always has paid dirt-cheap wages to its thousands of staff employees, leading to strikes and tensions in the last few decades. Peter Dobkin Hall, a historian who taught at Yale for many years, and now teaches at Harvard, wrote a detailed account in 2003 for the Yale Daily News on "How Yale Destroyed New Haven's Economy."
In 2005, Yale enjoyed a tax-free endowment of just over $15 billion after a 22.3% return on its investments in 2004. (Among universities, only Harvard has a larger endowment, at nearly $26 billion.) Yale alumni created the core of the endowment in good part because gifts to universities are a tax write-off. The endowment grows rapidly in large part because the capital gains on its in-and-out stock trades are not taxed (Stein, 2005). (The fact that Yale has the enormous sums to take advantage of company takeovers and private buy-outs arranged by billionaire capital funds also helps). So the university benefits in two ways from its tax-free status, but only in the 1990s did it get around to giving $2-$3 million each year in "voluntary contributions" to the city for fire services, a figure that rose to $4.18 million in 2004. (For a January 2008 update by a New York Times reporter on the growing dominance of Yale in New Haven, click here.)
In the face of these meager handouts and the increase in unemployment for low-income people in New Haven's inner city due to the Great Recession, gangs and gun violence also have increased. In an April, 2010 article entitled "In The Shadow of Yale, A World A Million Miles Away," the New York Times reported that 17 people were murdered in this city of just 124,000 in the half year between October 2009, and mid-April 2010.
By late October 2011, the homicide rate was the highest it had been since 1994, with two months remaining in the year. The 29th murder of the year occurred a block from the university's main science complex, in what was considered one of the safest neighborhoods in the city (whose residents include the president of the university). Much of the previous violent crime had occurred within a few miles of Yale, but "the vast majority of the homicides have plagued streets and neighborhoods that most Yalies have never heard of, let alone visited," according to the Yale Daily News. However, most of the murders were known to the Yale community even if they didn't pay attention to the local newspaper or television station: students received e-mail alerts about some of them from the Yale police department, and the school's newspaper ran several detailed accounts. In addition, many of Yale's black staff reside in the same neighborhoods in which a high percentage of the murders occurred; one dining hall employee told a reporter that he knew a majority of the 25 young men who had been killed by late summer. Meanwhile, Yale's president earned a salary of over $1.5 million a year by 2008, with the 605 full professors (excluding the medical faculty, which has even higher salaries) averaging $177,000 a year in 2011, and the 146 associate professors averaging $103,000. For further information and detail on homicides in New Haven in 2011, see this story and the included links to related stories.
4a15465005