# Fame.am profile — machine-readable export
# Canonical URL: https://fame.am/person/robert-a-dahl
# Generated: 2026-09-01T05:02:58.798Z

schema: https://schema.org/Person
url: "https://fame.am/person/robert-a-dahl"
name: "Robert A. Dahl"
slug: "robert-a-dahl"
description: "He gave democracy its working vocabulary. Robert Dahl named \"polyarchy\" — the messy, interest-group scramble that passes for democratic governance in the real world — and spent fifty years mapping the gap between the ideal and what actually happens when people bargain for power."
tagline: "American political scientist (1915–2014)"
image: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/Robert_A._Dahl_in_the_Classroom.jpg"
gender: "male"
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  entityType: "https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q39631"
birthDate: "1915-12-17"
deathDate: "2014-02-05"
livingStatus: "DECEASED"
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# bio (long form, separated for readability)
bio: |
  Born December 17, 1915, Dahl landed at Yale and stayed, becoming Sterling Professor of Political Science. He founded pluralist theory, the idea that political outcomes emerge from competition among unequal interest groups rather than some unified public will. He introduced "polyarchy" to describe how democracies actually function, then pioneered empirical methods to study decision-making in real institutions — American city halls, councils, the ground floor of power. His behavioralist approach made him the central figure in pluralist scholarship. Alongside that descriptive work, he spent decades articulating what democracy might look like as a "realizable ideal," sketching the constituent elements of a system that could exist, not just in theory. He died February 5, 2014, having rewritten the field's vocabulary.