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An excellent short overview and introduction on democracy: what it means, how it works, and how they differ. Certainly a must read for anyone looking to acquaint themselves with the system that many people experience on the daily, or live their lives yearning for.

3.5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️

bon llibre, millor politòloga en formació

like every student of introductory democratic theory, i was assigned this as a reading.

no rating because idk if i could rate academic reading vs reading for enjoyment on the same scale. still logging it on goodreads just as a means of keeping record :-/

I read this for class, it was fine I guess.

Clear, precise, a very good overview. Perhaps slightly out of date, since it was written during the Clinton presidency.

I want to like Dahl's work more than I do but can't. As critical as he is of current institutions, especially the American democratic state, ultimately he's an apologist for the status quo. For instance, here are his criteria for large-scale democracies:

1. Elected officials
2. Free, fair, and frequent elections
3. Freedom of expression
4. Alternative sources of information
5. Associational autonomy
6. Inclusive citizenship

Let's look at what the first amounts to in fact and how the reality basically topples any currency that the other criteria have.

Here Dahl describes what he means by elected officials: "control over government decisions about policy is constitutionally vested in officials elected by citizens. Thus modern, large-scale democratic governments are representative."

Note the slippage. The conclusion is invalid. While it's true we elect officials to serve in government for us, it doesn't follow that our government is representative in any real sense of the term.

About 10 years back, political scientist Martin Gilens really did a number on public policy data over the last 20 years and counting. He discovered that even when a policy issue was in the Overton window along the so-called liberal-conservative spectrum, those American citizens up to the 80th percentile had zero effect on public policy. That's evidence that runs contrary to the idea that America has a representative democracy.

Dahl claimed to be a behavioral political scientist in the sense that he wanted to look at how systems actually worked. I think the work Dahl produced mostly failed to do that. Worse than failed. At best what we get from Dahl is the judgment that we have a mostly good system that just happens to be plagued by elite imperfections. It's almost as if these elite imperfections were by design.

The book content is clear and systematic. Democracy is distinguished between what are ideals and what happens in reality. The distinction is helpful to analytically understand the complex subject. Also, it illustrates that democracy has intrinsic values needing to fight for.

Dahl’s impact on the theory of democracy is hard to overestimate. After all, he is the father of its pluralist theory. If you want to know what is democracy or what we measure other countries against when we consider them democratic or not, you need to read Dahl. His explanations are simple and easily digestible. His favourable conditions to make democracy possible in any given country can be taken as a to-do list by any political activists. Not easy to achieve but so needed in many places.

Wow was this the right time to read this book. This is a republished political science classic that examines the definition of democracy and under what conditions democracy survives, thrives, and is a stable political system.

Quotations like this seem particularly resonant in our post-2020 USA election environment:

"If the underlying conditions are highly favorable, stability is likely with almost any constitution the country is likely to adopt. If the underlying conditions are highly unfavorable, no constitution will save democracy."

or

"What is more, democracy could not long exist unless its citizens manage to create and maintain a supportive political culture, indeed a general culture supportive of these ideals and practices."

More a descriptive survey than a prescriptive cookbook, this book made me appreciate again how fragile our democracy has become over the last few decades.

**Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

An excellent primer on democracy (both actual and ideal). Very useful for anyone entering a field related to politics. Wouldn’t go so far as to call it a “fun read” though.

While no means the be-all and end-all of political writing, On Democracy is considered an essential reading for beginners in the study of political science. While Dahl is concise and clear, he only skims the surface of democratic theory. Of note: this book reads like a textbook, it provides the very basics of democracy (or at least one definition of it) -- don't look for in-depth analyses from Dahl here.