Professor Robert Dahl - obituary

Professor Robert Dahl, who has died aged 98, was an American political scientist once described as “the premier democratic theorist of our time”.

Dahl saw democracy as a theoretical Utopia against which all real-world democracies fall short. No state, he argued, can be described as truly democratic because, apart from turning out to vote, most people play very little part in the political process.

He coined the term “polyarchy” as a more accurate description when it comes to most countries we tend to call democracies. Characterised by elected officials, free and fair elections, inclusive suffrage, rights to run for office, freedom of expression, of the press and of association, polyarchies do not lead to the ideal of “majority rule” demanded by democratic theory. Instead, they promote popular sovereignty and political equality by increasing the size, number and variety of minorities whose preferences must be taken into account by political leaders.

Dahl described the polyarchic system in his best-known work, Who Governs?: Democracy and Power in an American City (1961), a study of power structures in New Haven, Connecticut, a pioneering work of empirical political science.

Against political theorists who saw the United States as a country governed by a small incestuous elite, he found that while power was distributed unequally in New Haven, it was also dispersed among a number of groups competing with each other, whose agendas did not always overlap, rather than monopolised by a single elite group. He acknowledged that many citizens did not participate and that the rich had advantages over the poor, but he concluded that New Haven, while a “republic of unequal citizens”, was still a republic.

In How Democratic Is the American Constitution? (2001) Dahl went on to examine the American system of government and found it wanting in many respects. Wise though the framers of the 1787 Constitution were, their vision was circumscribed by what they knew, what they mistakenly thought they knew, and what they lived too soon to have any way of knowing. Moreover, as a consequence of political horsetrading they were forced to swallow provisions to which many of them were strongly opposed.

Thus the original Constitution authorised inequalities, such as slavery and the exclusion of women from political participation, from some of which America had freed itself by subsequent democratising struggles, including a ruinous civil war. But even as amended, the Constitution still contained provisions which militated against true political equality. These include the so-called Connecticut Compromise whereby each state gets two senators regardless of population. “The result”, he observed, was that “a vote of a Nevada resident for the Senate is worth about 17 times the vote of a California resident. ” There was no plausible justification for this “inequality in the worth of the suffrage” which, far from protecting the least privileged minorities, had “sometimes served to protect the interests of the most privileged minorities”.

Some of Dahl’s harshest criticisms were reserved for the Supreme Court, which, among other things, may declare acts of Congress or of state governments to be unconstitutional and has the power of judicial review. In theory the court upholds the ideals of the framers of the Constitution and provides a check on the legislature and executive, but in practice, Dahl observed, because appointments to the court are political, its views “are never for long out of line with the policy views dominant among the lawmaking majorities of the United States”.

The son of a doctor, Robert Alan Dahl was born at Inwood, Iowa, on December 17 1915. After graduating from the University of Washington, he took a doctorate in Political Science at Yale. During the Second World War he worked as an economist on the War Production Board and then served in the US Army in Europe, winning the Bronze Star.

After the war he joined the Political Science faculty at Yale, where he taught until 1986 and subsequently became Sterling Professor Emeritus of Political Science.

Dahl was the author of 23 books, a member of the American National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was a corresponding fellow of the British Academy. He won several prizes, including the James Madison Award of the American Political Science Association, of which he served as president.

His first wife died in 1970. He is survived by his second wife, Ann, and by two sons and a daughter of his first marriage. A son of his first marriage also predeceased him.

Robert Dahl, born December 17 1915, died February 5 2014

Now listen to this week's obituaries podcast in which we talk to Jack Perry, who is among the last of the Guinea Pigs - burned WWII airmen operated on by Archie McIndoe