Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

662 Stein Rokkan
To get some perspective on these developments we shall have to go back to
our distinctions between alternative ‘models of data gathering’.
The commercial survey was essentially modelled on the election and the
referendum: the very name used to describe field operations of this type, polls,
rubbed in these origins in attempts at a miniaturization of officially established
consultations of the ‘people’. The great breakthrough in 1936 was the result of
a successful attempt to simulate elections ahead of time. There was sufficient
isomorphy between the situation in the interview and the situation in the polling
booth to make it safe to predict official results from the established frequencies
of responses to the interviewers. But the crucial development occurred after-
wards: the commercial surveyors shifted from the election model to the model
of the referendum, and claimed to be able to take the ‘people’s pulse’ not only
in matters of party strength or candidate choice, but even in matters of public
policy. The model of the referendum or the plebiscite was to have a profound
impact on the style of work in the commercial agencies, not only in their
reports to newspapers and radio networks on issues of public policy, but also
in their studies in the consumption market, of mass preferences among products.
In the early phase of commercial polling and market research the typical
report simply gave for each question the percent of responses one way or the
other: so many X, so many Y, so many Z, so many Don’t Know. The under-
lying model of the public was plebiscitarian and equalitarian. The ‘pollsters’
started out from the basic premise of full-suffrage democracy : ‘one citizen, one
vote, one value’. They equated votes and other expressions of opinion and
attributed the same numerical value to every such expression, whether actively
articulated independently of any interview, or elicited only in the interview
situation. The sum total of such unit expressions was presented as an estimate
of ‘public opinion’ on the given issue. The aim was clearly not merely elicita-
tion, classification, and enumeration: the essential aim was to establish the
‘will of the people’ through sample interviews instead of through elections
and referenda. To such pioneers as George Gallup and Elmo Roper, the
‘poll’ was essentially a new technique of democratic control: the interviews
helped to bring out the wil of the ‘inarticulate, unorganized majority of the
people’ as a countervailing power against the persuasive pressures of the many
minority interests.4’
For years this emphasis on the plebiscite as a model set the commercial
practitioners in opposition to the governmental and the academic survey pro-
fessionals.
A number of government agencies set up survey organizations from the late
1930s onwards to ensure quicker and cheaper data collection in areas that had
been poorly covered under the traditional systems of administrative bookkeep-
ing.
The best known and most far-ranging of these was probably the Social
Survey set up under the Central Office of Information in London. The operations
of these governmental agencies were modelled essentially on the census. They
were used to obtain inexpensive estimates of distributions within given popula-
tions and were geared to eminently practical tasks of policy guidance.