Robert A. Dahl: Questions, Concepts, Proving it

What were the ingredients of Robert A. Dahl’s genius as a political scientist? First, he asked good questions. Those were ordinarily bold, broad questions central to political theory that appear at the openings of his works and orient them. Second, he was resourceful in creating or tailoring holistic concepts such as ‘democracy’ and ‘power,’ as well as compositional categories such as ‘cumulative’ versus ‘noncumulative’ resources, or ‘participation’ and ‘contestation’ as routes to democratization. Third, he evangelized for hypothesis testing and reliance on datasets as the future of political science, and he acted on this advice.