Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition

"I was trying to think of a single book that would be a good both as a description and a primer on democracy. Frankly, I couldn’t find one, but this book is quite famous because Robert Dahl was one of the greatest students of democracy. In Polyarchy , he indicated that a democracy is a lot more than just elections and voting and the formal institutions that we associate with it and that democracy really is about pluralism. Pluralism has to exist on a variety of levels. It’s not just multiple political parties that compete against each other. It’s not just a free press in which you have different voices contending. It’s also a vigorous civil society in which people can organize and there have to be real connections between that civil society and the top-level institutions if the democracy is going to succeed. That leads to his title, Polyarchy , which is a kind of awkward term that few people would adopt. But it comes from the Greek and it means ‘many leaders’. It’s an indication that liberal democracy is really about diversity. It’s a means of governing over diverse societies and representing that diversity, but also coming up with means of compromising, deliberating, and coming to common decisions, despite the fact you have numerous divisions within the society. Right now, we’ve got a big problem in the United States with that understanding, and there are two different forms of it. On the right, there is this discomfort with the changing American national identity. Part of it has a racial dimension. Part of it is deeply cultural—a lot of conservatives don’t like gay marriage and LGBTQ rights. On the left, it’s a different sort of hostility to diversity. They don’t like conservatives. When they hear the word diversity, it’s only related to race, gender, sexual orientation. They’re not very tolerant towards people who are Christian conservatives, for example. This book is a good reminder that there are many forms of diversity in a democracy, and that you need the institutions that somehow manage to bridge those differences. I wrote two very long books, The Origins of Political Order and Political Order and Political Deca y . In them, I laid out the tripartite framework—about needing to understand that you’ve got these three components: the state (and hopefully a modern state), the rule of law, and democratic accountability, and that they are all separate. Historically, they appeared at different times. And you can mix and match. So Iran has kind of democratic elections—they just had one. They’re not so free and fair but sometimes there’s a surprise. What they don’t have is anything like a real rule of law that constrains their state. Singapore doesn’t have elections—or has kind of fake elections—but it has a pretty strong rule of law. It’s a way of understanding the diversity of political forms around the world, and also where they came from. The disadvantage is these two books, together, are around 1100 pages long. It’s not like you can go to them for a quick summary and get all that content in a really easy way. That’s right. In fact, more than that, because it takes it all the way back to the primates that were the predecessors of human beings."