Robert A. Dahl

an unended quest

David Baldwin, Mark Haugaard

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138651487
• eBook ISBN: 9781317229957
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book is devoted to the work of Robert A. Dahl, who passed away in 2014. Dahl was one of the most important American political scientists and normative democratic theorists of the post-war era, and he was also an influential teacher who mentored some of the most significant academics of the next two generations of American political science. As an incredibly productive scholar he had a career that spanned more than half a century, his first book was published in 1950 his last was in 2007 at the age of 92. As a political scientist, he was respected even by those who were critical of his works.

This theoretical significance and profound influence is reflected in the collection of chapters in this volume, which reads like a 'who's who' of the contemporary US political science scene. His co-author Bruce Stinebrickner documents the evolution of his and Dahl's seminal text, Modern Political Analysis and how it became the standard introduction to American political science for nearly fifty years. Katharine MacKinnon's chapter is of significance for its insights upon Dahl and also represents a succinct statement of a feminist reading and critique of contemporary political science. Steven Lukes contributes a highly concise statement of the difference between one-dimensional and three-dimensional power.

This work will be a standard reference work for any researchers or those interested in the work of Robert Dahl, among both established academics and students. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Political Power.

Introduction
Robert A. Dahl: an unended quest

David A. Baldwin^a and Mark Haugaard^b

^aColumbia and Princeton University, USA; ^bNational University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland

The legacy of Robert A. Dahl

The following essays are devoted to the work of Robert A. Dahl (1915–2014), whose immensely productive scholarly career spanned more than half a century. His first book was published in 1950 and his last in 2007 at the age of 92. During these years, he published numerous articles and more than twenty books. After spending his entire academic career as a member of the Department of Political Science at Yale University, he retired in 1986 and served thereafter as Sterling Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Senior Research Scientist in Sociology at Yale.

Professor Dahl served as President of the American Political Science Association in 1967, as a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and as a corresponding member of the British Academy. In 1995, he was the first recipient of the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science, an award given by Uppsala University in Sweden to the scholar who has made the most valuable contribution to political science.

It is impossible here to consider the many contributions Dahl made to the study of politics. We shall therefore consider only four—as political scientist, as methodologist, as power analyst, and as democratic theorist.

As a political scientist, he was respected even by those who were critical of his works. The Yale Daily News (February 7, 2014) noted that Foreign Affairs had called him the ‘dean of American political scientists.’ And his student and colleague, Ian Shapiro, observed that ‘he might well have been the most important political scientist of the last century, and he was certainly one of its preeminent social scientists.’ Shapiro added that:

In many ways, Dahl created the field of modern political science. To be sure, the scholarly study of politics goes back to at least the ancient Greeks. Dahl was no Plato, Aristotle, or Thomas Hobbes; but he added something new to the armchair reflection leavened by illuminating anecdote that characterized the enterprise for millennia: the systematic use of evidence to evaluate rigorously stated theoretical claims. Generations of Dahl’s successors have developed both theories and empirical methods in multiple directions since he produced his innovative works in the 1950s and 1960s, sometimes in ways that he found less than congenial. Few would deny that they stood on Dahl’s shoulders (Shapiro, 2014).

Despite Dahl’s contributions to empirical political science, it would be a mistake to describe him as nothing but an empiricist. He also recognized—and practiced—normative inquiry and conceptual analysis as important components of modern political analysis. Various works as well as his text Modern Political Analysis make this clear. Nor can his work be described in terms of a single subfield of political science. As Jeffrey Isaac points out:

[Dahl] wrote major books that were seminal to three subfields of political science—‘A Preface to Democratic Theory’ (political theory), ‘Who Governs?’ (American politics), and ‘Polyarchy’ (comparative politics). Indeed his work straddled and bridged the conventional subfields, none of which could encompass his thinking (2014).

In addition to the subfields identified by Isaac, one could mention the seminal contribution to the relatively new subfield of political economy he co-authored with Charles E. Lindblom—Politics, Economics, and Welfare (1953). In 1997, he observed that the book was a response to the need:

To recreate a modern ‘political economy,’ after the late nineteenth-century divorce of neoclassical economics and political science. Scholars who specialized in 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 political life (1997, p. 6).

As a methodologist, Dahl’s name is associated with the ‘behavioral movement’ in political science in the 1950s and 1960s. The three components of this movement were (1) increased emphasis on empirical research, (2) more methodological self-consciousness, and (3) establishing links with other behavioral sciences—sociology, psychology, anthropology, and economics. Although he was a leader—perhaps the leader—of the behavioral movement, he was never a captive thereof. The following passage makes this unmistakably clear:

Some readers of my work may not fully appreciate that different problems require different methodologies 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, quantitative, linguistic, moral-ethical, and institutional methods and approaches all have a place, though not necessarily in the same work. Methodologically speaking, I am deliberately and shamelessly eclectic. I believe strongly that the question one wants to investigate should dictate the choice of methodology; a methodology should never dictate the choice of question (1997, p. 8).

As a power analyst, Dahl set out to bring clarity and precision to what he saw as an unsatisfactory treatment of the concept of power in social science. He described himself as having been ‘dismayed by the casual and undiscriminating way in which most social scientists, including political scientists, employed the term “power,” ignoring the complexities of the concept as if somehow these complexities were trivial’ (1997, p. 12). He identifies Thomas Hobbes, Max Weber, and Harold Lasswell as important influences on his thinking about power. For Dahl, power was the essential defining characteristic of politics. And since he saw power as ubiquitous, he viewed politics in many social relations not commonly thought of as ‘political’—including romantic couples, churches, business firms, families, and even academic departments.

Most (perhaps all) of Dahl’s work relates directly or indirectly to democracy. He notes, however, that ‘I never set out to become a “democratic theorist.” Even the term “democratic theory” hardly existed when I began writing.’ Looking back nearly forty years later, Dahl described his first book, Congress and Foreign Policy (1950), as ‘really a venture in “democratic theory,” though I probably would not have put it that way in 1950’ (1997, p. 6). Dahl not only became a ‘democratic theorist,’ he came to be widely viewed as the founder of this field of study. The term ‘polyarchy,’ first introduced by Dahl and Lindblom in 1953, has become an essential part of contemporary democratic theory.

Reflections upon the essays in this collection

It is striking that all the authors in this collection have a profound intellectual respect for Robert Dahl and many, especially those that knew him personally, felt a deep fondness for him as an individual. These fine qualities are not two different elements but are intertwined.

This phenomenon is most immediately felt in Dahl’s use of prose. Dahl crafted words upon the page in such a way that readers have the sensation that the author is speaking directly to them. This is similar to the way great portrait painters can make the subject on the canvas so alive that you feel them looking at you.

The sensation of a living voice is particularly strong in Dahl’s use of Socratic dialogue. In Democracy and Its Critics (1989), Dahl becomes the wise, kindly, interlocutor arguing on behalf of pluralist democracy, against the challenges of Anarchos (Dahl, 1989, pp. 39–41) and Aristos (1989, pp. 55–64). While Dahl argues with conviction, what makes him particularly effective is that he is also a good listener. When Dahl speaks on behalf of Anarchos or Aristos, he puts their best arguments forward to test and then refute them, but never in a dismissive way. Dahl does not set up straw men to be demolished. Rather, Dahl is listening and openly acknowledges that his adversaries (especially Aristos) have powerful arguments.

This openness to other points of view applies both to Robert Dahl’s published work and to his interaction with others, as related in an anecdote narrated to us by Jennifer Hochschild in her essay.

Hochschild is deeply appreciative of Dahl’s work in its widest sense, which includes his role as mentor and teacher. However, she is critical of the fact that race is not sufficiently prominent in Dahl’s early work. In one particular essay, Dahl lists five periods of consequential expansion of the democratic decision-making process in the United States, but fails to include among these the abolition of slavery. However, when she queried this omission to him in person, Dahl readily volunteered that he wished he were in a position to retrospectively rewrite that article in order to correct his mistake.

Dahl’s ability to listen and rethink his position is not simply about quality of character. It links into his wider scientific interpretative world-view, which was not black and white. Rather, it was nuanced shades of gray. Unlike many of his intellectual interlocutors, Dahl’s version of democracy is an imperfect thing. Dahl is clear about the various attributes that a democracy should aspire to, yet he appreciates that no democracy can ever fully reach these ideals. Real-life pluralist democracy, or polyarchy, is an imperfect thing but desirable nonetheless.

Dahl’s normative world was a scalar one, with tyranny at one end and the egalitarian ideals of democracy at the other. Real-life democracies, as they happen in the actual empirical world, are somewhere on that scale. Over the course of his life, we see Dahl’s placement of US democracy slips further from the ideal end of the scale, toward the midway point.

Dahl’s generosity of spirit, which was refracted through nuanced shades of gray scalar vision, is linked to a wider methodological orientation. Dahl combines a Weberian use of ideal types with a scientific, Popperian (Popper, 1992) type, quest for falsification.

As argued by David Mayhew in this book, Dahl’s use of ideal types is both empirical and normative. On the empirical level, this means that Dahl distils the essence of a phenomenon into clear concepts that serve as conceptual tools to order the world in a systematic way. Normatively, the use of ideal types means theorizing the evaluative aspirations of democracy. Neither empirical concepts nor normative ideals are to be found in their pure form in the empirical world.

The emphasis upon scientific method combined with the empirical ideal types gives Dahl the reflective capacity to begin all his analysis with the right questions. As argued by Mayhew, one of the reasons that Dahl stands out as a scholar is that he always begins his research with the right questions. For instance, the opening sentence of Who Governs? (‘In a political system where nearly every adult may vote but where knowledge, wealth, social position, access to officials, and other resources are unequally distributed, who actually governs?’ [1961, p. 1]) represents the key question for anyone who wishes to empirically test the level of democracy of a system.

Theorizing by constructing ideal types means simplifying the world. You reach the essence of something by removing what is considered extraneous. When Galileo wanted to understand the falling movement of bodies, he theorized this by methodologically bracketing the resistance of air. That was despite the fact that Galileo could only test his ideas by performing experiments surrounded by air. This simplification entails the exclusion of what is judged to be extraneous.

As argued by Hochschild in this book, in this respect Dahl’s conceptual strength could manifest itself as his weakness. While Who Governs? is a seminal text of empirical rigor, it also contains a remarkable lack, which is a blindness to the significance of race. It is not that race was entirely absent, or that Dahl had, in any way, a racial bias. Rather, Dahl failed to see that the urban redevelopment of New Haven was also the beginning of a black/white ghettoization that would, not many years after the study, transform itself into overt racial tensions. In short, through the process of scientific simplification of the data, Dahl had excluded a key variable that, with the benefit of hindsight, turned out to be significant.

The use of empirically based ideal types made Dahl careful in defining his concepts. He used these conceptual tools with remarkable skill. As argued by Bruce Stinebrickner in his essay, spanning four decades of Dahl’s scholarly career, Dahl framed the language of contemporary political science. His 1957 article is the beginning of real scientific, as opposed to polemical, debate on the nature and distribution of power.

In his essay, Stinebrickner traces the evolution of Dahl’s development of concepts through careful analysis of the development of the various editions of Modern Political Analysis (MPA), from its first edition in 1963 to the sixth in 2003 (Dahl and Stinebrickner 1963—Stinebrickner was the co-author of the latter but, modestly, treats this work as entirely Dahl’s).

The first edition MPA definition of the essence of politics was exceptionally forward-looking. Dahl defined politics in terms of the exercise of influence. This was a much wider definition than any of his contemporaries and predecessors, who tended to equate politics with government or control of territory. This makes Dahl’s conceptualization of politics still relevant in the contemporary context in which, for instance, feminists, such as Catharine MacKinnon, would argue that the family constitutes a part of the political sphere.

As argued by Stinebrickner, having defined politics in terms of influence, Dahl points out that although influence terms are central to political analysis, they are rarely properly defined. It is from this premise that we obtain his renowned definitions of the vocabulary of power, which include not only his previous definition of power (‘A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do’ [1957, p. 202]) but also the distinction between the exercise of power and power resources, scope and domain of power, and other influence terms, including inducement, force, coercion, persuasion, manipulation, and authority.

As MPA develops over the six editions, Dahl absorbs some of the criticisms made of his work on power. In the sixth edition, he distinguishes four levels of decision-making. As set out by Stinebrickner, these include (1) conflict within the options of an already existing agenda, (2) changes to the agenda, (3) structures, and (4) the awareness of social actors. Stinebrickner views this four-level framework as Dahl’s last word in response to his many critics in the three-dimensional power debate, including Steven Lukes.

It is a debatable point whether this response actually represents a shift in position or simply a clarification of a relatively constant position. In his essay, David Baldwin argues that much of the (so-called) three- (or four-) dimensional power debate entails attributing ideas and concepts to Dahl that he did not hold. For instance, as also observed by Stinebrickner, Dahl never linked power to interests, so in that sense his perspective was wider than Lukes’. Unlike Dahl, in the first edition of Power: A Radical View (1974), Lukes defines power in terms of the inability of the dominated to realize their interests; while in the second edition (2005) and his contribution to this book, Lukes acknowledges that this was too narrow. Power is neutral with regard to the subject of B’s interests, which it was for Dahl from the very beginning.

The conventional rendering of this debate (whereby Dahl begins with a narrow one-dimensional view and others widen the concept through the addition of other dimensions) is fundamentally flawed because it is based upon a failure to understand the full implications of using Weberian ideal types. Ideal-type concepts are constructed through a distillation of the essence of the empirical world. Consequently, these conceptual constructions do not exist empirically in the pure form. Hence, when dealing with a particular empirical project, such as measuring power in New Haven, it can be necessary to use operational definitions that are of a lower order, closer to reality, than the ideal types.

As argued by Baldwin, there is a significant gap between ideal-type concepts and operational definitions created for specific purposes. For the purposes of the empirical analysis undertaken to write Who Governs? it may be operationally necessary to measure power in terms of decision-making. However, this is not equivalent to claiming that the concept of power solely equates to de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction – Robert A. Dahl: an unended quest
• 2. Robert Dahl: scholar, teacher, and democrat
• 3. Robert A. Dahl: questions, concepts, proving it
• 4. Robert A. Dahl and the essentials of Modern Political Analysis: politics, influence, power, and polyarchy
• 5. Misinterpreting Dahl on power
• 6. Dahl’s concept of leadership: notes towards a theory of leadership in a democracy
• 7. Dahl’s feminism?
• 8. Robert Dahl on power
• 9. Dahl’s power and republican freedom
• Index