ABSTRACT
Robert A. Dahl had been influential in the field of political science since the early 1950s, when he established himself as a leading scholar of the behavioralist school of thought. Democracy and Its Critics uses Dahl's long-standing research practice, which was to examine real, existing democracies rather than idealized, theoretical democracies. During the 1960s and 1970s, pluralist democracy came under heavy criticism from scholars who argued that there were important differences between the pluralist democratic model and the way that Western democracies actually worked. Throughout Dahl's career he examined real, existing democracies, declaring them in fact to be polyarchies that fell short of genuine democratic ideals. He proposed certain standards for a country to be called a polyarchy, and a separate set of standards for a political process to be considered democratic. He then proposed ways that countries might close the gap between polyarchy and real democracy.
