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On Democracy - Review

Commonweal, April 9, 1999 by Alan Wolfe

Robert A. Dahl Yale University Press, $20, 217 pp.

Alan Wolfe

If democracy means one person, one vote, Robert A. Dahl has been writing about democracy for just about as long as that proposition has been operative - at least in a surprisingly large number of countries. Great Britain, for example, abolished double votes for professors at Oxford and Cambridge in 1948, two years before Dahl published his first book. And Switzerland did not extend the right to vote to women until after Dahl had already established himself as one of the major political scientists of the twentieth century. On Democracy offers Dahl, who is eighty-four-years-old, a chance to reflect on a lifetime of preoccupation with questions of how citizens can effectively shape the power exercised by states presumably on their behalf.

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Dahl's work has always been characterized by an unusual combination of analytical precision, empirical sensitivity, and passionate conviction. Unlike many quantitative political scientists, he focuses on large and important - indeed the largest and most important - questions. Unlike many political theorists, he has never been afraid of analytic precision. And unlike those who believe that political science demands strict objectivity, Dahl has long shown a passionate concern for encouraging greater equality.

All these features of his work are on display in On Democracy. One part of the book is conceptual. Democracy, Dahl believes, exists when members of any association have a roughly equal say in deciding what that association does. The ancient Greeks and Scandinavian tribes governed themselves in roughly this way, even if they excluded large numbers of people - slaves, women, foreigners - from the ranks of those eligible for equality. Modern democracy, which Dahl calls polyarchy, calls for the creation of political institutions which can compensate for the fact that contemporary states are too big, and the lives of the people living within them too complex, for everyone to get together with any frequency to decide things in common. Elections, a free press, autonomous associations, and inclusive citizenship are among the institutions required to make polyarchy work.

Democracy, Dahl also argues, has ethical advantages over other systems. Such goals as moral autonomy and human development are furthered by democracies. Democratic countries are less likely to go to war than nondemocratic ones. They are also more likely to be prosperous.

This last point suggests that there will be natural affinity between democracy and a market economy, but on this point Dahl is not so sure. True, market economies create a broad middle class which comes to prize democratic institutions and practices. That may be why there has simply never been an enduring democratic system of governance in any society which relied on a nonmarket economy. But Dahl also believes that "democracy and market capitalism are locked in a persistent conflict in which each modifies and limits the other." Inequalities in economic resources, for example, inevitably translate into inequalities in political resources, and if the latter become too extensive, democratic institutions are severely crimped.

Dahl's treatment of these themes shows the author's flair for cutting to the essentials of an argument. Yet his quick pace, which contributes to much of the elegance of the argument, also carries risks. For some of the questions Dahl presumes to be settled are more contentious than his treatment allows.

One of the most difficult questions with which democracies have to deal is what could be called the separation of conflict from consensus over policy goals. For example, most fair-minded people agree that the elimination of poverty is a desirable goal. Conflict arises inevitably over what is the best way to attain that goal. Moreover, it is not always possible to say whether any given issue involves rules, in which case we all ought to be united in agreement, or whether it involves policy goals, in which case we have an obligation to disagree. Dahl believes that the principle of equal participation is a rule rather than a goal; our system is democratic to the extent that everyone has an equal capacity to affect outcomes. Some citizens, however, tend not to participate as much as others. Among them are African-Americans. If this lack of participation is due to formal procedures designed to exclude African-Americans from the franchise, as was the case during segregation, that clearly violates democratic rules and ought not to be permitted.

But suppose African-Americans participate less because they are more likely to be poor and poor people participate less? If we conclude from this that special measures should be taken to increase economic equality so that political equality can be furthered, we are talking about a policy goal, not a rule. There will be, and there ought to be, disagreement over the best way to reach that goal. Can we say that people who favor cutbacks in welfare, thereby possibly contributing to greater inequality, are undemocratic because they will be furthering political inequality? If we do, aren't we saying that such views are illegitimate, a view which itself seems hostile to democracy?

On Democracy - Review

Commonweal, April 9, 1999 by Alan Wolfe

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