Vol. 1, Number 4	Winter 1998 issue

 

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Robert Dahl's On Democracy is a clear, short statement of the most basic issues any thoughtful person might raise about democracy as it is practiced around the world. The book is a distillation, a simplification, and sometimes a clarification of ideas Dahl has already advanced elsewhere, chiefly in his landmark academic works A Preface to Democratic Theory and Democracy and its Critics. Here, by confining himself entirely to fundamentals, Dahl has created a concise primer on democracy that can substantially inform a reader who has never thought about these questions before.

Dahl's focus is consciously international. He emphasizes theory over the particulars of nations, and even writes with a deliberately unidiomatic English style in order to facilitate the book's translation into many languages. Dahl draws almost none of his examples from America, but strangely, the criteria he enumerates for what constitutes a democracy may have their most revolutionary implications in our own country. Dahl ultimately casts some profound doubts on the American democratic system as we presently practice it, and he does so simply by asking questions that are unusually basic and incisive.

Dahl spends much of On Democracy simply trying to answer the question of what a "democracy" is—not on the level of governing cities and nations, but simply in terms of how one might make decisions in a small organization or assembly so as to give all members an equal voice. The most interesting thing about his definition is that it makes no reference at all to representative government, an idea that underlies every democratic system from the New Haven Board of Aldermen to the British House of Commons.

Instead, Dahl approaches the problem with an unusual simplicity: his ultimate condition for democracy, on which everything else rests, is political equality. To Dahl, a state is only a democracy when it widens suffrage to include everyone in the decision-making process. (He reluctantly counts democracies with "full male suffrage" in order to acknowledge that democracies of some sort existed before the early part of this century, but he is unable to hide a sentiment that democracy did not actually exist anywhere until women won the vote.)

Giving everyone an equal voice is a simple goal, but it is also elusive. For example, Dahl argues that if everyone's votes count equally but a few elites control what goes on the agenda, democracy has not been fully realized. And equal access to decision-making by itself is not enough—all must have enough information to make competent choices.

These fundamental tenets, abstract as they sound at first, are the reason On Democracy has such far-reaching implications for America. For example, take Dahl's assertion that democracy cannot be achieved even if everyone votes, if only a few elites are allowed to speak in public forums. Our American system has been in tension with this idea ever since Buckley v. Valeo, in which the Supreme Court declared that spending money is a form of speech. Ever since that decision, "speech" in many public forums has become explicitly dependent on the size of one's wallet.

Today, we can place few limits on the ability of rich individuals and corporations to make their voices heard. In recent years, the explosion of "soft-money" contributions to Political Action Committees has allowed donors to evade even these few rules. Should the trend continue, we could easily reach a point at which the ability of an individual to air her views in a public forum will be dependent not on her democratic endowment (one vote) but on her endowment of available cash. Our system would then be not the "polyarchic" system (rule of the many) that Dahl advocates, but an oligarchic system ruled by the monied few.

A related set of developments in America calls into question a different precondition Dahl argues is necessary for democracy—the public retaining its power to "set the agenda." Rule by the many is useless, he argues, if the decisions they make are on resolutions drafted by the few.

This spring, a bipartisan majority in Congress decided to force tobacco companies to compensate smokers for the fact that they had knowingly peddled an addictive drug to millions of Americans. But before they could pass the bill, a strange thing happened: the tobacco companies suddenly siezed the power to manipulate the agenda. By taking out a $40 million, eight-week radio and TV advertising blitz, they successfully recast the tobacco bill as a tax to be shouldered by ordinary Americans. Somehow, Congress discovered, instead of deciding whether to punish companies for illegally peddling an addictive drug, in the public's eyes it was deciding whether or not to create a new and burdensome tax. Through a huge pot of money and some creative ads, tobacco companies had completely captured the agenda from the people's delegates. Without a ban on this sort of "issue advertising," it will be impossible to keep the American legislative agenda safe from this sort of manipulation.

Perhaps the most insidious development of all from the perspective of Dahl's preconditions is the state—or rather, the diverging states—of the American public school system. As the quality of education for rich children outstrips that available to the poor, we approach a strange result. Increasingly, only Americans with rich parents will be sufficiently informed—or sufficiently skilled at exercising critical judgement—to be active political citizens. Information, the skills to use that information, and even the sense of engagement that underlies voting or other political acts—these are basic preconditions that every citizen must share, yet all of them are called into question by educational inequality.

A simple theme seems to underlie the various instances in which America fails to live up to Dahl's model. Put simply, our democracy's current problems are traceable to the force often cited as its greatest asset: market capitalism. Dahl explores the connection between capitalism and democracy in some detail, though generally with the developing world rather than America in mind. The connection between democracy and capitalism, he asserts, is more complicated than the conventional wisdom that their development progresses hand in hand. The free market does tend to create a constituency for personal freedoms, which helps democracy develop. And it works in reverse: the transparency and accountability of democratic systems tends to reduce the corruption that might otherwise hinder a capitalist economy.

But there is also an inherent conflict between the two. Capitalism, as Dahl puts it, "inevitably generates inequalities in the political resources to which different citizens have access." Dahl does not specifically choose to draw attention to this fact, but in a significant sense this story of inequality is the most recent chapter in the story of America. Despite our best efforts to erect walls between our economy and our politics, ultimately it seems that wealthier Americans, who are empowered in every other imaginable way, will become increasingly empowered in politics as well.

The cause of retaining an egalitarian democracy despite our capitalism is not hopeless, but it is not easy either. It is frightening that the reforms necessary to counteract increasing inequality of political resources—campaign finance reform, bans on "issue ads," fiscal equity in education—are not mainstream causes. For the present, they remain relegated to the agendas of radicals.

Can anything force mainstream Americans out of our complacency and actually sensitize us to the forces that threaten democracy? Perhaps the crucial first step is a reexamination of what democracy is ultimately about. After reading this clear, basic account of how democracy should work, the shortcomings of our own system are striking.