A Critical Examination Of Dahl's Theory Of Pluralist Democracy

Robert. A. Dahl is the most important spokesman among all the democratic theorists of the time. His theory of pluralist democracy was founded on former conceptions and developed with the new desire of political diversification of 20th century.The two principles of the pluralist democracy are check and balance and interest groups. It means the decision of government is influenced or changed by some interest groups in some extent, which could satisfy different requirements and abate interclass conflicts in American. Dahl uses "polyarchy" instead of "democracy". It means the right of democracy should be divided among the people as widely as possible by voting, participating, and supervising. Dahl's theory has obvious limitation, because it propitious to powerful interest groups but goes against puniness. He himself also belongs to bourgeoisie, so he cannot transcend his class limitation to solve the problem in the way of Marxism. This article analyses Dahl's theory of pluralist democracy objectively and critically, in order to find out its logical and reasonable factors, which would be helpful to perfect democratic course of China.