For more than 40 years, Robert Dahl’ s theory of polyarchy democracy has been considered by scholars as one of the most effective, robust, and enlightening forms of contemporary revisionist democratic theory. The English version of this book was published in 1971 and its translation was published in 2018. Polyarchy is defined as a set of institutional arrangements that allow for public opposition and inclusive participation in politics. The central assumption of the sign in this book, which involves a linear process, is that when hegemonic systems and competitive dictatorships move toward multiculturalism, opportunities for effective participation and questioning increase. Therefore, the number of individuals, groups, and interests whose policy priorities are considered increases. In this article, an attempt is made to examine the intellectual background and studies of Robert Dahl over two decades (19701950) and to identify the roots of the development of his theory of polyarchy democracy, presented in the form of an independent book, in his earlier works.

Although there had been consensus on defining the democracy as "the people govern themselves", but objective implication of such vision have seen controversial. Nowadays, this conflict is refer to two principal approach: 1)The "explainatory/methodological" approach that defines democracy as an institutional mechanism for turn-in politics by people's Vote. 2) The "normative/ontological" approach that considers democracy as a kind of form of life, which is based on liberty and equality, that is due to expanding the scope of democratic inclusiveness onto all strata. In this essay compares the "polyarchy", as a modern pluralist democracy (the case for first approach) with the "radical democracy", as a postmodern pluralist democracy (a case for second approach);Supposing that Laclau & Mouffe's radical democratic project might be interpreted as the revival of the original ideals of democracy, based on the postmodern turn and shift in political analysis base, by going beyond from restricted / behavioral tradition of classic pluralism in the vision of thinkers like Robert Dahl.

The purpose of this article is to survey the historic process of democracy in Iran after Islamic revolution by benefiting from Robert Dahl’ s polyarchy model and qualifying his threefold indexes as political participation, political competition and political supervision and their mixture through Boolean algebra technic as to show the historic fluctuation process of democracy in Iran after revolution. By periodization the history after Islamic revolution into four periods, i. e. first period (1979-82), second period (1982-98), third period (1988-2006), fourth period (2006-2013), the collected data show that the amount of democracy indicators has fluctuated over time except the period of 1979-1982, but, the fluctuation has leaned to up, not down. In spite of affluent sources which have surveyed this topic mostly qualitatively or have surveyed some parts of this topic, this article has attempted to survey the different parts of this topic methodically and quantitatively through mixed method; this article has also received an outcome that the historic process of democracy in Iran after revolution has progressed so far, and presumably it would progress in future if its looked through a historical sociology.