D

Dahl

Robert Dahl (b. 1915) is probably one of the best known of all the talented and
energetic political scientists who appeared on the American academic scene
shortly after the Second World War and effected a great development of the
discipline that has influenced its practice throughout the Western world. His
work covers both political theory and empirical political research, but he is best
known as the most important of thepluralistwriters on democratic theory.
The pluralist school recast the definitions of democracy to make it more
realistically applicable to the Western political systems. He produced one of the
shortest, clearest, and most original of all these restatements of democracy,A
Preface to Democratic Theory, in which he developed his idea ofpolyarchy. The
essence of this approach is that democracy is assured as long as no group or
sector influences all or a broad range of issue areas, and that ‘intense’ minorities
have their concerns respected. He also carried out one of the earliest of the
community powerstudies, in which he demonstrated, at least to his own
satisfaction, that the American city of New Haven satisfied his own theory of
democracy. There are few fields of political science he has not touched, and
although he has often been criticized by those less convinced of the value of
Western political systems, his ideas have not been seriously challenged within
mainstream political science.

De Facto

De factorule or power simply means that, as it happens, a certain group, class,
nation or whatever is in a position to control and order some political system.
It does not necessarily mean that the rulers are illegitimate, but its principal use
is as a contrast withde jurepower.De jurepower means that, according to some
legal or political theory, a particular group is entitled to give, withlegitimacy,
orders of some type. Again, the actual coincidence depends on the theory one
chooses to apply. To take an extreme example, someone might hold that
Britain hadde jureauthority over a long-lost colony, or that England only had
de factopower over Scotland and Wales, depending on the choice of ideologies.