Reflections on A Preface to Democratic Theory

Abstract

afforded the opportunity to review ourselves. The years pass, we labour in new domains, rarely do we reflect critically on our earlier workthough our reputations and the body of our subsequent work may rest on it. In this new intermittent serieswe dub it 'Author/Author'-Government and Opposition proposes to invite distinguished political scientists and theorists who have written books of enduring significance to choose one of their earlier works and reflect selfcritically and retrospectively on it. What are the circumstances of its composition? How did it influence subsequent work? Was its critical reception just? Have its basic argumc..s held up over time? How might they be revised in the light of later developments in political science and the political world? Each instalment of 'Author/Author' will respond to these kinds of questions. Our inaugural article is from Robert Dahl, one of the great political scientists of the postwar era, a former President of the American Political Science Association, and the winner of many awards, including, for his most recent book Democracy and Its Critics, the Woodrow Wilson Award of the American Political Science Association and the Spitz Award of the Conference for the Study of Political Thought. For us, Dahl has chosen to review his Preface to Democratic Theory.

Constitutional stability

“…To secure stable expectations, suppose instead that society chooses a person at random to "run" against an incumbent, lets both persons compete by proposing alternative policies, uses a majority vote to determine a new incumbent, implements the policy advocated by that new incumbent, and compensates the winner sufficiently so that winners gain more by implementing their promises than by implementing their ideal policy --that is, suppose the society conforms to Dahl's (1956) ideal of a polyarchy. At this point we can appeal to the Median Voter Theorem (Result 4), which tells us that a stable outcome prevails and that that outcome corresponds to society's median preference.…”

Measuring Electoral Democracy with V-Dem Data: Introducing a New Polyarchy Index

“…More specifically, we shall concentrate on a particular way of understanding democracy as a yardstick, one that has dominated the empirical social sciences since at least the second world war. Through the seminal work of Schumpeter (1942), Downs (1957) and Dahl (1956Dahl ( , 1971, a relative consensus has evolved that views elections -together with the institutions that uphold the democratic qualities of elections -as the core of the concept. We will call this the electoral conception of democracy, to distinguish it from other, more idealized, conceptions -such as liberal, participatory, deliberative, or egalitarian democracy (see Coppedge et al 2015a, Lindberg et al 2014) -that do not stress elections as democracy's core institutional pillar.…”

“…This measure is based on the methodology of the Varieties of Democracy project (Coppedge et al 2015d, see also www.v-dem.net), which draws on multiple expert perceptions of a large number of disaggregated indicators from a global sample of countries since 1900. More precisely, we use ratings provided by over 2,600 scholars and other experts on 36 specific indicators at country-year level to measure the core "institutional guarantees" in Dahl's (1971Dahl's ( , 1989Dahl's ( , 1998 concept of "polyarchy." We also launch an aggregate index of these components to measure electoral democracy.…”

Does Separation of Powers Promote Stability and Moderation?

“…McGann (2006) claims the the stability induced by super-majority rules is inimical to minorities because it will be harder for them to form new coalitions to undo adverse outcomes. Thus McGann-making an argument reminiscent of Dahl (1956), Ely (1980), andMiller (1983)-suggests that in a well-functioning majoritarian democracy there are unlikely to be permanent losers, because minorities can break apart the majority coalition in the future.…”