Robert A. Dahl (1915–), is a Sterling Professor emeritus of political science at Yale University, a past president of the American Political Science Association and one of the most distinguished political scientists writing today.

In the 1960s, he was involved in a landmark dispute with C. Wright Mills over the nature of politics in the United States. Mills held that America's governments are in the grasp of a unitary and demographically narrow power elite. Dahl responded that there are many different elites involved, who have to work both in contention and in compromise with one another. If this is not democracy in a populist sense, Dahl contended, it is at least polyarchy. (from Wikipedia.com)

His many books include A Preface to Democratic Theory (1956), Who Governs? (1961), Modern Political Analysis (1963), After the Revolution? (1970), Polyarchy (1971), Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy (1982), A Preface to Economic Democracy (1985), Democracy and Its Critics (1989), On Democracy (1998), and How Democratic Is the American Constitution? (2002).