Quotes from Robert A. Dahl

Require... electoral votes to be allocated in proportion to the popular votes.

Ironically, the very fact that democracy has such a lengthy history has actually contributed to confusion and disagreement, for 'democracy' has meant different things to different people at different times and places.

democratic theory is concerned with processes by which ordinary citizens exert a relatively high degree of control over leaders;

Why should we feel bound today by a document produced more than two centuries ago by a group of fifty-five mortal men, actually signed by only thirty-nine, a fair number of whom were slaveholders, and adopted in only thirteen states by the votes of fewer than two thousand men, all of whom are long since dead and mainly forgotten?2

As with the United States, so too in these other five countries federalism was not so much a free choice as a self-evident necessity imposed by history.

The Framers feared and detested factions, a view famously expressed by Madison in Federalist No. 10.31 Probably no statement has been so often cited to explain and justify the checks against popular majorities that the Framers attempted to build into the constitution. It is supremely ironic, therefore, that more than anyone except Jefferson, it was Madison who helped to create the Republican Party in order to defeat the Federalists.

The American constitutional system is not majoritarian.

Among the most influential of these was George Mason, who wrote the Virginia constitution and its Declaration of Rights. Responding to the insistent demands of Mason and several others, as well as to similar voices outside the Convention, Mason's fellow Virginian, James Madison, drafted ten amendments that were ratified in 1789–90 by eleven states, more than a sufficient number for their adoption.

Both Caligula and Abraham Lincoln sought power, yet it is highly implausible to suppose that Caligula and Lincoln were driven by the same motives.

Yet among the countries most comparable to the United States and where democratic institutions have long existed without breakdown, not one has adopted our American constitutional system. It would be fair to say that without a single exception they have all rejected it.

That the idea of equality was alive and well among Viking freemen in the tenth century is attested to by the answer given by some Danish Vikings when, while traveling up a river in France, they were asked by a messenger calling out from the riverbank, "What is the name of your master?" "None," they replied, "we are all equals."3

That the idea of equality was alive and well among Viking freemen in the tenth century is attested to by the answer given by some Danish Vikings when, while traveling up a river in France, they were asked by a messenger calling out from the riverbank, "What is the name of your master?" "None," they replied, "we are all equals.

Most of us readily take things for granted that at an earlier time remained to be discovered

The future of that ancient chamber remains in considerable doubt.

As in Athens, the right to participate was restricted to men, just as it was also in all later democracies and republics until the twentieth century.

Glorious as it had been, the city-state was obsolete.

Democracy, it appears, is a bit chancy. But its chances also depend on what we do ourselves