Suchergebnisse

This department is devoted to shorter articles and notes on research in the communications field, either completed or in progress. Readers are invited to submit reports on investigative studies which might prove useful to other students because of content, method, or implications for further research.

During 1953 and 1954 two different experiments designed to determine the comparative effectiveness of personalized and impersonalized propaganda techniques were conducted in Ann Arbor. Although "scientific" in orientation, both of them were carried out in conjunction with the teaching of a political science course in public opinion. This not only provided a unique pedagogical opportunity but also made possible the execution of a particularly difficult type of research. In the report following the first year's experiment, the class procedure used and the drawbacks resulting from the use of students were discussed. Here we will present the major findings and interpretations of two years of such experimental work.Personal contact in political campaigns in the United States today receives a prominent emphasis in the thinking and planning of party strategists. Despite technological improvements in the mass media, especially television, there is today no diminution in attention to programs for personalized appeals to "get out the vote," unsystematic though such programs may often be. Successful political campaigners in recent years invariably relate their success in part, at least, to the volume of their handshaking, their extensive itineraries, and the intensity of personalized organizational work. In November, 1954 President Eisenhower made history with his initiation of a Republican "talkathon" by telephoning ten party workers around the nation just before election day.

Voting has become truly an interdisciplinary object of investigation in recent years. Historians, statisticians, social psychologists, sociologists, and political scientists have focused their attention on electoral behavior, individually or in teams. Such studies have been principally the work of scholars in the traditional Western democracies—Britain, France, Norway, Sweden, the United States—and fall roughly into three patterns. One approach has been to analyze trends in group voting behavior on the basis of census and election statistics, and frequently poll data as well, in a search for meaningful correlations between voting trends and socio-economic factors. The work of Siegfried and, more recently, Goguel in France, of Heberle in Germany, Tingsten in Sweden, and Gosnell and Key in the United States belongs in this category. A second approach has been descriptive, identified in recent years particularly with Nuffield College at Oxford. The Nuffield studies of elections in Britain, France, Ireland, Poland, Italy, and Africa have focused on the efforts of candidates and parties to influence voters in a particular electoral campaign. They are intended primarily to be contributions to contemporary history and works of reference for future historians. Lastly, we have the investigations associated, in particular, with the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University and the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan. These have focused on the political images and electoral behavior of individual voters and, particularly, on changes in their attitudes during a campaign and the reasons for such changes. They have relied, almost exclusively, on survey research methods which involve questioning a panel of representative voters at length before and after an election and, lately, even over a period of several years and elections.

In continuation of a previous study, the rôle of some nationality groups in the last three presidential elections has been investigated. Whereas the previous study was based upon political behavior by counties within eight states, the present work is based upon political behavior by wards within four cities. The cities were chosen because they contained large proportions of certain nationality groups, and because in these cities it was possible to order census tract material from the 1940 census by wards. Only four cities (Buffalo, Chicago, Detroit, and Pittsburgh) were examined because of limitations of time and expense. New York City is not included because of appreciable changes in the boundaries of Assembly districts between elections.In order that a group be amenable to our procedure, it was necessary that there be proportionately great enough concentrations within wards so that the actual voting behavior of the group could possibly induce a shift in the election results. In this respect, it must be remembered that the proportion of foreign-born is usually about one-third of the total stock of any given group in the localities. Of the fourteen nationality groups studied here, therefore, not every one could be tested by our method.