Robert Dahl’s On Democracy is a handbook of sorts setting out the basics of his vision of democracy. He more or less articulates a liberal pluralist version of democracy without using that term specifically. The term he does use, polyarchal democracy, he describes as a political system that has:

1. Elected officials

2. Free, fair, and frequent elections

3. Freedom of expression

4. Access to alternative sources of information

5. Associational autonomy

6. Inclusive citizenship

If a country meets these criteria they can be considered a democracy. Dahl asserts that the value of democracy is political equality, and how democratic a system is should be determined by how much political equality is found in the system. I would think political equality has a deeper value though—autonomy. Political equality is a desirable trait simply because it respects the autonomy of each citizen, or gives each citizen the greatest chance of maximizing their autonomy.

Dahl has relatively little to say about the liberal part of liberal pluralism though. Freedom of expression and associational autonomy seem to be important to him mostly because he thinks they are required for democracy to work, not because they have intrinsic value.

At the very least, Dahl gives us a fairly easy way to evaluate political institutions: how they score on the 6 dimensions of polyarchy, and how they increase or decrease political equality. He doesn’t critique American democracy specifically beyond saying that there is a reason our political institutions have not been widely copied. He feels they are too complicated, and, unstated but implied, don’t do enough to ensure political equality. Not addressed though is the fact that the institutions chosen in the United States were not chosen to ensure political equality; they were chosen to be a safeguard on a strong central government, and also to reflect the unique political moment in which the new states found themselves (think of the compromises necessary between large and small states).

He also has a section on how market economies both help and hurt democracies. Nothing new here though; basically the same argument Plato had thousands of years ago. Some people are going to get richer than others, and will have a better chance of getting their preferences met, and often those preferences will harm the rest of the citizens who might resort to anti-democratic actions when they can’t achieve what they see as justice. But there’s no real way of getting around that, since democracy and a market economy just naturally go hand in hand. There’s never been a successful democracy without a market economy. You just have to somehow find the right level of government regulation to prevent the worst excesses of unbridled self-interest of the market without stifling the good parts. And we’ll complain either way as citizens!