Pathways to Polling: Crisis, Cooperation and the Making of Public Opinion Professions

by Amy Fried

Book Overview

In midcentury America, the public opinion polling enterprise faced a crisis of legitimacy. Every major polling firm predicted a win for Thomas Dewey over Harry Truman in the 1948 presidential election-and of course they all got it wrong. This failure generated considerable criticisms of polling and pollsters were forced to defend their craft, the quantitative analysis of public sentiment.

Pathways to Polling argues that early political pollsters,...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0415891418
• ISBN13: 9780415891417
• Release Date: August 2011
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"