International Encyclopedia of Communication Online

Extract

Election research has played a decisive part in the development of the methods of → survey research from the beginning. More than market and media research, election research has awoken, in a special way, the curiosity and the ambition of researchers, and thus strongly affected empirical social research. It is significant that the breakthroughs of both the modern method of the representative survey and of empirical methods in communication research are connected with studies in electoral choice (→ Research Methods ). The first attempts at analyzing elections using statistical methods can be traced back to the early twentieth century. In 1905, the German researcher R. Blank published a detailed social science analysis of the social democratic party's electorate ( Blank 1905 ). A decade later, attempts began to predict future electoral behavior on the basis of pre-election polls. In 1916, an American magazine, Literary Digest , began to conduct write-in mass surveys before presidential elections, so-called “straw polls.” This endeavor became rather gigantic over the years, with 20 million ballot forms being sent to addresses taken from telephone registers and automobile licensing offices in the election year of 1932. At the same time, another approach to studying consumer behavior had established itself in business life since the 1920s: interviewing a few hundred people, but taking ... log in or subscribe to read full text