A Preface to Democratic Theory, Expanded Edition
Language: English
Pages: 200
ISBN: 0226134342
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
For this fiftieth-anniversary edition, Dahl has written an extensive new afterword that reevaluates Madisonian theory in light of recent research. And in a new foreword, he reflects back on his influential volume and the ways his views have evolved since he wrote it. For any student or scholar of political science, this new material is an essential update on a gold standard in the evolving field of democratic theory.
“A Preface to Democratic Theory is well worth the devoted attention of anyone who cares about democracy.”—Political Science Quarterly
In Mistrust We Trust: Can Democracy Survive When We Don't Trust Our Leaders?
Democracies and Dictatorships in Latin America: Emergence, Survival, and Fall
The Case For Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror
Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America
Liberalism: The Life of an Idea
Costs against which probable gains must be measured is too incomplete to assist us much in the real world. VII The last remark recalls a point made earlier: the theory of populistic democracy is not an empirical system. It consists only of logical relations among ethical postulates. It tells us nothing about t he real world. From it we can predict no behavior whatsoever. This is a point of cardinal importance in appraising the significance of the theory. For as we have seen, on a number of.
Cent of those who favored Stevenson did not vote.• In a close division of opinion, the difference in the proportions of non-voters would have been crucial.' 2. However, modem sample surveys of public opinion are now helpful in this respect. 3. See TM Prt·Ekction PoUs of 1948 (New York: Social Science Research Council, 1949); Angus Campbell and R. L. Kahn, TM People Ekcl a PresidenJ (Ann Arbor: Institute for Social Research, 1952); Angus Campbell, Gerald Gurin, and Warren E . Miller, The Vot In word usage boiled down to language, not political institutions. Yet whether called democracies or republics, the political systems of Athens, Rome, a nd the Italian city-states were totally inap· propriate for eighteenth-century America. To be sure, a long with their citizen assemblies, the Athenian democracy and the Roman republic bad some elements of representation. But by no stretch could their political systems serve as models for a representative government in the United States of. Rights of minorities. So what was to be done? Madison's solution included several elements: federa lism, a constitution of limited enumerated powers, a nd, as I have mentioned, the election of representatives.23 But Madison's most original contribution, the one for which he is probably best known and for which he has been cited endlessly, was to enlarge the size of a republic. "Extend the s phere," he asserted, "and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less p. Examine here. My point simply is that enlarging the sphere might just set the stage for irresoluble conflict. I have sometimes wondered whether Madison stressed the advantages of size in order to counter the objections of t he Anti-Federalists, perhaps the most vigorous opponents of the new federal system. If so, it was a shrewd move. But that does not make his conjecture empirically valid. The second major flaw that remained in Madison's revised constitutional theory is the tacit exclusion from.