Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

Chapter 5
Constructing Social Unity and Presenting Clear
Predictions: The Promise of Public Opinion
Pollsters to Measure and Educate Society
Norbert Grube
Social sciences create phenomena. This thesis, put forward by Thomas Osborne
and Nicolas Rose (1999), means that social sciences do not only construe reality in
a manipulative way but detect interrelations which were previously unknown.
Here I want to focus on polls as an instrument to measure people’s attitudes
and opinions of. I will concentrate on the Allensbach Institute of Public Opinion
Research, the oldest German institute that was founded by Erich Peter Neumann
(1912–1973) and Elisabeth Noelle (1916) in 1947. It was a private business venture
with scientific ambitions. In this study I want to deal with two main areas. In the first
part I analyse the self-legitimisation of pollsters as observers of the social in order to
strengthen democracy. Here I refer to John Dewey’s plea that social sciences should
provide the means to create the great community and to the modification of this
idea put forward in 1935 by George Horace Gallup (1901–1984), the founder of
the American Institute of Public Opinion. Following on from this, I look at post-
1945 West Germany. Keeping in mind the critiques of polling made by the likes
of Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002), Vance Packard (1914–1996) and Theodor Adorno
(1903–1969), I will examine ethical issues surrounding polling. In the second part,
I will show how poll data generate a new national narrative in the era of neo-liberal
governments (Foucault, 2004a, 2004b). Do polls create public communication and
advance the establishment of democratic participation? Do they merely construe one
national body (community) by creating a kind of clear and rational discourse about
national topics in order to avoid irrational, radical, or even violent political conflicts?
If this is so does it mean that polls intensify the dualistic political scheme of friend
versus enemy (Schmitt, 1932/2002, p. 26), thus dividing the population in two or
more camps of opinion and excluding minority groups who cannot be integrated
into these camps? Opinion research is seen here as a permanent observation of the
population, which monthly or annually creates updated trends of opinion formation.
Referring to these series pollsters claim to predict future opinions and suggest the
N. Grube (B)
Institut für Historische Bildungsforschung Pestalozzianum, Zürich, Switzerland
P. Smeyers, M. Depaepe (eds.), Educational Research: The Ethics and Aesthetics
of Statistics, Educational Research 5, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-9873-3_5,
C○ Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010
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