Research On Dahl’s Thought Of Political Equality

There have been debates in the relationship between equality and freedom that arethe intrinsic value of democracy. Dahl understood political equality from the perspectiveof resource allocation methods in order to coordinate the contradiction between equalityand freedom. First of all, starting from pluralistic power, he pointed out that powerholder included not only countries but also a variety of organizations. Theseautonomous organizations owned power influencing governments’ policies bytransforming resources at disposal into political resources. Degree of influences wasaffected by allocation of political resources. In a pluralistic society, each organizationheld certain resources but no organization can hold all critical resources to haveexclusive influence. For one thing, diversification of resources held by organizationswas beneficial to citizens of autonomous organizations to actively participate in thepolitical life and helped organizations to preserve their independence. For another thing,it was also conducive for organizations to fight against the intervention of state powerand unequal statuses among organizations. Dahl’s analysis of political equality includedcontinuous theory discussion and description of practical experiences. In the politicallife, due to the imbalance of political resources allocation, it happens a large number ofunequal phenomenon. Facing the situation that American political equality wasconfronted with problems of market economy、crisis and scale as well as threat from theinternational system, in addition to encouraging the government to take more reformsand measures of reducing political inequality, Dahl realized that in order to truly realizepolitical equality, it should start from polyarchy to ideal democracy. On one hand, Dahl started from existing problems firstly. he designed economic democracy andconsociational democracy for the disadvantaged and subculture groups; On the otherhand, In the aspect of citizens’ orientation, He believed that for privileged stratum andmainstream culture group, American political culture that transformed from competitiveconsumerism culture to "civic identity" helped them to pursue better form ofgovernment and political equality. Moreover, Dahl returned to reflection of theconstitution and he held the opinion that there were many factors of inequality in theAmerican constitutional system, By criticism, Dahl hoped people will change theirformer attitude towards U.S. Constitution.