Robert Dahl

In On Political Equality (2006), Dahl addresses the issue of equality and discusses how and why governments have fallen short of their democratic ideals. He assesses the contemporary political landscape in the United States.

In How Democratic Is the American Constitution? (2001), Dahl argued that the US Constitution is much less democratic than it ought to be, given that its authors were operating from a position of "profound ignorance" about the future. However, he adds 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."

Dahl wrote many books on democracy throughout his career. The most influential are Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (1971) and Democracy and Its Critics (1989).

Dahl was married to Mary Bartlett until her passing in 1970, and then to Ann Sale, a Presbyterian.

Dahl served as president of the American Political Science Association in 1966/67.

From the late 1960s onwards, his conclusions were challenged by scholars such as G. William Domhoff and Charles E. Lindblom (a friend and colleague of Dahl).

Dahl's influential early books include A Preface to Democratic Theory (1956), Who Governs? (1961), and Pluralist Democracy in the United States (1967), which presented pluralistic explanations for political rule in the United States.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he was involved in an academic disagreement with C. Wright Mills over the nature of politics in the United States. Mills held that America's governments are in the 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 (or pluralism). In perhaps his best known work, Who Governs? (1961), he examines the power structures (both formal and informal) in the city of New Haven, Connecticut, as a case study, and finds that it supports this view.

After World War II, Dahl returned to Yale in 1946, where he was offered a temporary position teaching American government. The position became permanent, and Dahl remained at Yale his entire career, until his retirement in 1986. He was Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science from 1955 to 1964, and Sterling Professor from 1964 to 1986. Dahl was departmental chair from 1957 to 1962.

After receiving his Ph.D., Dahl worked in the government in Washington DC and then volunteered for a spell in the US army. He served in Europe during World War II, was the leader of a small reconnaissance platoon in an infantry regiment, and earned a Bronze Star. He led a platoon that took part in a major offensive in November 1944.

He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Washington in 1936 and his Ph.D. from Yale in 1940.

Robert Alan Dahl (/dɑːl/; December 17, 1915 – February 5, 2014) was an American political theorist and Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University.

Dahl was born in Inwood, Iowa, on December 17, 1915. His father Peter came from a Norwegian family, while his mother Vera came from a Protestant American background.