American Politics: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Valelly Richard M

Author:Valelly, Richard M. [Valelly, Richard M.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2013-02-10T16:00:00+00:00

7. George Gallup at the University of Iowa in the 1920s. A decade later, Gallup helped to develop the survey research that today provides a way to assess whether government officials and public policy are in accord with public opinion.

Gallup admired a nineteenth-century British democratic theorist, Lord James Bryce, who speculated that a new and better “stage” in democracy might be reached “if the will of the majority were to become ascertainable at all times.” Bryce wondered, though, if such “machinery for weighing or measuring the popular will from week to week or month to month” could actually be invented. Gallup believed that his polling advances did just that: they allowed the voice of the public to be heard clearly and continuously. His surveys represented the machinery that would realize a new phase in the development of American democracy.

Gallup’s own machinery was imperfect, particularly in the way he biased his samples to represent the electorate, not the public, and this meant that he grossly under-sampled African Americans. He later famously predicted Thomas Dewey’s non-victory over President Harry Truman in the 1948 presidential election because he stopped polling too far in advance of Election Day. Gallup and his fellow pioneers in polling (such as Archibald Crossley and Elmo Roper) nonetheless paved a new way for elected officials to represent the public. They founded an extra-constitutional context for political representation that has steadily grown in importance.

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