Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

62 N. Grube
Fernsehen) in order to present data during an election campaign. According to
Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann’s (1980) concept of the ‘public opinion research correspondent’
the Allensbach Institute monthly publishes results and interpretations
in the ‘Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung’, one of the most important newspapers
in Germany. Big publishers, magazines, newspapers or broadcast channels ordered
polls for studies looking at readership and audience research. In the last decade
almost 10% of the annual turnover of the German poll agencies was generated
by research for media and publishers (ADM, 2008, p. 11). Today, every important
German polling agency surveys the people due to contractual obligations with
newspapers, magazines like Der Spiegel, Focus and TV channels. But the selective
presentation of poll data in the media does not only enlighten and strengthen the
public discourse. Poll agencies are financially dependent on powerful media companies
and consumer goods industries. Therefore, polls create a pseudo-conversation
with people. I use the term pseudo-conversation because the questions accord with
dominant discourses. Dominant discourses will be enforced if polls strongly refer
to or direct attention to them. Interviewees are treated like customers. This clashes
with Dewey’s idealist vision of a new community characterised by free and transparent
communication as polls construct and delimit social reality. They divide the
population into social/consumer groups.
However, pollsters, such as those from Allensbach, defined empirical social
research as a science that would enhance democracy (Demokratiewissenschaft) (Plé,
1990, pp. 258–259; Neumann, 1952). Post-war Germany provides an interesting historical
context for looking at the relationship between polls and democracy. This is
partly due to the western allies’ attempts to re-educate. Within this process of reeducation
the pollsters themselves had educational ambitions. They felt that statistics
played an important role in educating the people in accordance with governmental
guidelines. Between 1945 and 1949, special sections of allied military governments
used polls for the democratic transformation of Germany. These groups included the
survey section of the office of the US-Military Government (OMGUS) (Merritt &
Merritt, 1970, 1980), the British Public Opinion Research Organization (PORO)
and the French Education Publique (Grube, 2007; Kutsch, 1995). In a few instances
the reeducation process was influenced by readings of Dewey (Schlander, 1981).
Though it appears that polls help to strengthen democracy, to what extent could
pollsters reconstruct Dewey’s ideal of free public communication? In the German
context, the military administration or the new government were the customers of
pollsters. They belonged to the political scene at the beginning of the Cold War era.
Therefore, in accordance with government agendas pollsters were prevented from
publishing all the data. Furthermore, the rise of polls ran parallel to the consolidation
and extension of the national welfare state (Raphael, 1996, p. 182). National governments
and bureaucracies became important customers of pollsters. Questioning
a sample of the national population can help to reconstruct the national society but
not transcending its discursive limits (Igo, 2007).
In post-war West Germany findings from the social sciences were put into the
service of the government, and the pollsters implicitly followed Walter Lippmann’s
suggestions. For example, two or three times a month the Allensbach Institute of