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472 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 9 (1984)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0472 and id is 1 raw text is: PREFACE Governments are instituted among Men, says the Declaration of Independence, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. But how is the will of the governed to be ascertained? How, without the greatest inconvenience, can votes be frequently taken on all the chief questions that arise? asked James Lord Bryce in 1888, in The American Commonwealth. Today, less than 100 years later, public sentiment can and is being sounded almost daily on one topic or another. These soundings are sufficiently accurate to prompt basing some of the most far-reaching decisions on their outcome. Politicians run for office or remove themselves from candidacy; U.S. presidents resign or ask for the resignation of their closest aides; social welfare and other public services are strengthened or curtailed; multimillion dollar entertainment shows are launched or terminated-all based on the results of public opinion polls. It has been estimated that at least 2000 research organizations are engaged in public opinion polling in addition to many times that number of businesses and academic institutions that regularly conduct surveys. More than $4 billion annually are spent getting people's reactions to this or that. Polling is a growing industry in an age in which about half the gross national product and more than half of the income earned derives from the production and dissemination of information, according to Megatrends, a best-selling book by John Naisbitt. Political campaigns in the past 20 years have become unthinkable without public opinion polling, even at the local levels. Many of the major mass media now have their own in-house polling capabilities. In the modern newsroom, man-in-the-street interviews as a means of determining public opinion are rapidly disappearing, along with typewriters and black-pencil editing. Precisionjournalism has replaced the haphazard interview in all but a few small radio stations. Like other major conveniences of the twentieth century, such as the automobile, the airplane, television, and computers, public opinion polling is built on conceptualizations and inventions that are every bit as ingenious and essential to its execution as the wheel or electricity and magnetism are to modern technology. In the first chapter of this volume, I attempt to trace the various conceptual antecedents of polling. The lines that converge in today's scientific polls drew on the contributions of philosophers, astronomers, mathematicians, economists, sociol- ogists, psychologists, political scientists, geneticists, statisticians, and communica- tion scholars, among others. In spite of all these inputs and the continuing refinements that are being made in polling methods, Burns W. Roper points out that polls are not error-free. One does not, of course, look for the micrometric precision one has come to expect in modern technology. Both the variables that are measured and the measuring instruments are too lacking in specificity to permit that kind of accuracy. But the very looseness of language that, incidentally, makes communication possible creates problems for the pollster. Since words can be understood in various ways, question wording introduces a tentativeness to polling results that makes them depend, more than most scientists care to admit, on intuition. 9

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