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Journal
of
the History
of
the Behavioral Sciences
Volume
30,
January
1994
THE PSYCHOLOGY
OF
VOTING ACTION
ON
THE
PSYCHOLOGICAL
ORIGINS
OF
ELECTORAL RESEARCH,
1939-1964
MAX
VISSER
This article examines the development
of
psychologically oriented voting behavior
research between
1939-1964.
It intends to show the psychological basis of the Colum-
bia and Michigan approaches
and
its implications for the analysis
of
electoral behavior.
It is argued that, in spite of the large differences commonly perceived between these
two approaches, there is much similarity between them, both with regard to their
psychological roots as
to
their principal conclusions.
I. INTRODUCTION
The study
of
voting behavior is one
of
the oldest and most venerable branches
of
political science, with antecedents going back to the beginning of this century. At first
electoral research was predominantly demographically oriented, using official election
and census statistics as its principal data. With the advent
of
the first public opinion
polls in the
1930s
it became possible to research voting choices at the level of the in-
dividual voter; the use of such polls and surveys has quickly proliferated since then to
become the dominant mode
of
inquiry in the field
of
electoral research, if not in most
areas of social science.
Partly forced by the aggregate nature of their data, the first electoral analysts adopted
a macro-sociological view of voting behavior, exploring voting tendencies among occu-
pational, religious and ecological groups. The advent
of
opinion polls and surveys made
it possible to analyze electoral behavior in a more psychological way, and as the use
of
surveys spread, the quality and quantity of psychologically oriented voting research
increased with it, becoming the dominant paradigm in electoral research.
Psychology probably decisively entered the field of voting behavior research in
1939,
when Paul Lazarsfeld and
his
staff at Columbia University set out to plan the Erie County
election study. Lazarsfeld received his training at the Psychological Institute of the
University
of
Vienna and hoped to extend his earlier psychological analyses of human
actions to the field
of
voting behavior. In the late
1940s
a group of voting analysts at
the University
of
Michigan began to criticize the Columbia approach, developing an
alternative view
of
voting action, based on Kurt Lewin’s field theory. Although this
Michigan approach is influential to the present time, its development essentially was
concluded in
1964,
with the publication of Philip
E.
Converse’s paper on belief systems.
This article examines the development of psychologically oriented electoral research
during these first twenty-five, formative years. It intends to show the psychological basis
of
the Columbia and Michigan approaches and its implications for the analysis of elec-
toral behavior. More specifically it will be argued that, in spite of the large differences
commonly perceived between these two approaches, there is much similarity between
the two schools, both with regard to their psychological roots as to their principal
conclusions.
MAX
VISSER
is in the Department
of
Public Administration
&
Political Science, University
of
Twente, P.O.
Box
21
7,
7500
AE Enschede, The Netherlands.
43
44
MAX
VISSER
In order to attain these goals I will first discuss the work of Lazarsfeld and the
Columbia school, followed by a discussion
of
the Michigan approach and its
psychological antecedents. Finally, I will compare the two schools and assess similarities
and differences between them.
11. LAZARSFELD
AND
THE
EWIRICAL ANALYSIS
OF
VOTING
ACTION
Paul F. Lazarsfeld
(1901-1976)
entered the University of Vienna after the first World
War and received his Ph.D. in applied mathematics in
1925.
In the early
1920s
he studied
and worked with the German psychologists Karl and Charlotte Buhler, then engaged
in developmental psychology. In
1925
Lazarsfeld founded the
“Wirtschaftspsychologische
Forschungsstelle” as a part of the Vienna Psychological Institute, dedicated to the ap-
plication of psychology to social and economic problems. Until his emigration to the
United States in
1933,
Lazarsfeld acted as research director
of
the “Forschungsstelle,”
directing and stimulating a great number of research projects for business firms, city
agencies and others.’
From the Buhlers Lazarsfeld took over a strong interest in the empirical study of
human action, an interest that would occupy him for the rest of his professional life.
Action analysis could be applid to all kinds of actions, choices and decisions, from con-
sumer purchases and occupational choice to migration and voting decisions. Lazarsfeld
searched for convergences between different approaches and methods, and for him the
analysis
of
action offered
the
promising prosp7ect
“of
merging
the
study
of
indiuiduals
with the study
of
the aggregate effects of individual actions,
and
thus
as
a
way of
merg-
ing
psychology and sociology.”2
Lazarsfeld also adopted Karl Buhler’s method of detailed and repeated introspec-
tive interviewing, and combined this with his own interests in statistics and applied
mathematics. Thus, in his Vienna years, the groundwork was laid for the greater part
of Lazarsfeld‘s later substantive and methodological contributions to the social sciences.
The basic ideas of Lazarsfeld emerged from his earliest publications. In an analysis
of motives behind Viennese adolescents’ choices of occupation Lazarsfeld followed Karl
Buhler’s fundamental observation that “jede Handlung aus einer Konvergenz von Bedurf-
nis und Gelegenheit entsteht
.”3
Obviously, occupational choice constituted an action
(Handlung) in Buhler’s sense, and therefore its motives should also be classified in terms
of inner needs (Bedurfnis) and external occasions (Gelegenheit). However, these inner
and outer factors should not be treated independently, because they interact in the actor’s
subjective reality: existing needs may influence the actor’s perception of occasions, while
the occurrence
of
occasions may determine the degree to which satisfaction of needs
may take place. A correct explanation of occupational choice should concentrate on
this process of interaction between different motives in the course
of
the adolescent’s
development. For each individual the choice process should be researched through
detailed introspective interviews, in which the course
of
the decisional process is recorded
from the very beginning to the ultimate choice of occupation.
After his emigration to the
U.S.
Lazarsfeld refined his theory of a~tion.~ He
distinguished the inner factors in motives and mechanisms. Motives refer to “the set
of
inner guiding processes which determine the movement of behavior toward ends or
goals . .
.
[The processes] refer to some [conscious or unconscious] condition of tension
or disequilibrium within the person, with the ensuing conduct serving to relieve the tension
or to reestablish equilibrium.” The variety of different motives that a person may have
is reflected in specific attitudes, which Lazarsfeld defines as “action tendencies toward
THE
PSYCHOLOGY
OF
VOTING
ACTION
45
particular objects,” and which are the immediate determinants
of
beha~ior.~ Mechanisms
are the mental, sensory and motoric capacities that the person has, and these capacities
largely determine in what specific way motives will produce a specific action.
Lazarsfeld further elaborated the process aspect of action by stressing the impor-
tance of a time-line. The concrete action is a culminating point of a process extending
over time, and a real understanding
of
any action must involve a developmental analysis
of “what went before.”
Such an analysis of action requires an elaborate methodology. The simple ques-
tion “Why did you perform this action” typically results in a plethora of incomparable
or
meaningless responses, and Lazarsfeld
soon
concluded that in the absence of
a
natural
structure of action, the investigator himself must impose a structure on it, depending
upon the purpose of the investigations.6 Out of these considerations grew the panel
methodology to research actions in an empirical way.
It was Lazarsfeld’s basic idea that voting action was essentially similar to consumer
decisions or occupational choices, when he entered the field of voting studies in
1939.
He decided
to
study voting decisions, instead of consumer purchases, because of distinct
methodological advantages of the former.
The study of the
1940
U.S.
presidential election in Erie County, Ohio, had two
goals, one substantive and one methodological. The first goal was to study “votes in
the making”: how do voters make up their minds, and what is the role of the mass media
in that process? The second goal involved the study
of
the panel method itself: what
is the effect of repeated interviewing on panel respondents?
To answer these questions, a panel of
600
respondents was interviewed seven times
in the seven months preceding the election, while the effects of the panel method were
countered by using four separate, matched control groups. A community rather than
a national sample was selected in order to keep the possible array of campaign stimuli
under investigative control. Elaborate accounts were made of the flows of information
in all Erie County media, coinciding with the seven panel interview waves,
so
that sub-
jective and objective factors would be researched simultaneously.
However, when the first results came in, it turned out that voting decisions differed
from consumer decisions in some crucial aspects. First, nine out of ten voters had made
their decision well before the start of the campaign,
so
that the whole elaborate research
design had relevance for only fifty-four respondents out of the original
600,
a number
far too small to permit generalizing or to state statistically significant conclusions.
Secondly, in the absence of substantive change the influence effects of the media cam-
paigns could not clearly be discerned and analyzed. And, finally, the different personality
variables intended as measures of the respondents’ deeper motives did not show any
noticeable effect in the analysis.
The data
so
much contradicted the original expectations of Lazarsfeld and his staff
that, out of disappointment with the results of the first analyses, they laid them aside
for a year. When Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson and Hazel Gaudet finally published the
results in
The
People’s
Choice
(1944),
they did not mention the original action model,
nor did they say much about the panel methodology. Instead, a different picture of voting
action emerged, largely as a result
of
a
multivariate elaboration of the data and the
inductive finding of relationships between variables originally included for other research
purposes.’
In this analysis of voting action a heavy emphasis was laid on external influences,
in particular on the impact of the voters’ primary groups. Voting action was seen as
46
MAX
VISSER
almost wholly determined by social forces, in several aspects. First, social groups
displayed such clear tendencies toward voting for one party or another that Lazarsfeld
et al. were able to explain voting choices from only three social characteristics, expressed
in an Index of Political Predisposition.8 Second, voting intentions supported by the voter’s
primary groups were far more reliably carried out than intentions lacking such support.’
Furthermore, the social groups interposed themselves between the formal communica-
tion media and the individual voter: media messages were picked up by the groups’ most
active members (opinion leaders) and disseminated to the less involved group members
in a form congenial to the group members’ political standards. Since these members
individually also tended to view political propaganda in a highly selective way, shielding
themselves from opinions unfavorable to their own, there was little opportunity for
parties and other political actors to convert voters to their cause.
lo
Changes in voting actions and intentions did
OCCUT,
though, but these too were dependent
upon the social process. Voters who in the course of the campaign vacillated between
different parties or changed their vote from one election to another were more often
than not subjected to cross-pressures, i.e., diverging forces pulling the voter in different
directions. These cross-pressures were considered mainly social in nature, referring to
conflicting pressures arising from a voter’s memberships in social groups with different
voting tendencies. Although Lazarsfeld and
his
colleagues acknowledged the possibility
of
psychological cross-pressures, these did not play a noticeable role in their analyses.
l1
Out of the original action model there appeared an account
of
voting choices that
was almost completely due to social influences, but lacking on the aspects
of
motives,
attitudes, and mechanisms; it
was
a description of the vote, well summarized in the state-
ment
“a
person thinks, politically, as he is, socially. Social characteristics determine
political preference
.
”
l2
Eight years later Lazarsfeld and his staff returned to the study of voting. The ob-
ject
of
investigation was the
1948
U.S.
presidential election in Elmira, New York. The
study
was
intended
as
a
replication of the Erie County research, with an essentially similar
design, but with some important substantive additions to the questionnaire and the
description of the community. It involved a four-wave panel of
1
,OOO
respondents each,
with no control groups. In comparison to the earlier study, more attention was given
to the activities
of
local party and other political organizations, and to the respondents’
positions on and perceptions of issues; less effort was put in measuring exposure to cam-
paign items in general. Finally, the report of the
1948
study
(Voting,
1954)
was different
from
The People’s Choice
in modes
of
analysis and interpretati~n.’~
With regard to the substantive results,
Voting
followed the emphasis in the earlier
report on the social environment
of
the voter. However, the discussion of group associa-
tions, which were solely regarded as primary in nature in
The People’s Choice,
was sup-
plemented by a treatment of group identifications and group
perception^.'^
Voting
also
contained an important discussion
of
the role of issues, and the voters’ perceptions
of
the issue positions
of
the two candidates. Cross-pressures were now considered to be
social psychological in nature, as conflicting forces inducing tensions in the person.
l5
Lazarsfeld et al. concluded that the psychological function
of
selective perception is
to avoid these tensions, i.e., to retain harmony with one’s primary and secondary groups
as well as in one’s ideas.16
With the inclusion of group and political perceptions Lazarsfeld returned to the
original action scheme, in which the actor’s reality is simultaneously formed by his sub-
jective state of mind and by objective events that impinge upon him. The odd balance
THE PSYCHOLOGY
OF
VOTING ACTION
47
of
the early work,
so
confined to external influences, therefore was redressed in the later
study, giving due weight to motives, attitudes and mechanisms.
Voting
was the final volume on voting behavior of Lazarsfeld’s research group.
Several other studies on aspects of political behavior emanated from his Bureau of
Applied Social Research, but no new comprehensive studies of “votes in the making.””
The reasons for this withdrawal were financial and organizational: the Bureau had
difficulty in finding financial support, and in general, “it was destined to remain, like
its founder
.
.
.
somewhat marginal to the mainstream of American academic
life
.
. .
[The Bureau] survived for forty years, generally amidst administrative chaos,
and with conspicuously little financial support from the university.”18 The future of
voting studies in
an
institutional sense belonged to other institutes, in particular the Survey
Research Center of the University of Michigan.
111.
THE
FIELD
THEORY
OF
VOTING
ACTION
Although several sources have contributed to the development of the Michigan
approach to electoral behavior, the most important influence came from Kurt Lewin’s
field theory.
Kurt Lewin
(1890-1947)
studied and worked at the University
of
Berlin under Gestalt
psychologists Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Kohler, becoming a “Dozent” in
1922
and
“au@erordentlichen Professor” in
1927.
Following the
Nazi
seizure
of
power in
1933,
he did not return to Berlin from
a
six-month stay at Cornell University, but remained
in the United States. In
1935
he moved to the Child Welfare Research Station
of
the
University of Iowa, and ten years later he returned to the east to become the director
of
the new Research Center for Group Dynamics at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.”
Although trained and working at the center of Gestalt theory, Lewin could never
truly be called an orthodox Gestaltist. Gestalt notions like the isomorphism thesis or
the law of “Pragnanz” did not receive much attention in his work, nor was he overly
concerned with introspective experiments on perception and thinking. Lewin’s interest
lay in dynamic psychology, in uncovering the dynamics
of
human action. He devised
a field theory of motivation, the Gestaltist adaptation of the only motivation theory
existing at that time, the Freudian system.20
A
point of departure in both Lewin’s and Freud’s theories were human needs; these
produce tensions in the person, impelling him to activity directed at their gratification.
Needs, Lewin reasoned, thus have the character of organizing actions. Factors in the
person’s subjective field which contribute to need satisfaction acquire a positive valence;
they exert a force on the person to approach them. Field factors which impede
a
gratifica-
tion of needs, however, attain
a
negative valence, exerting a force on the person to avoid
them. What action actually will occur is dependent upon the whole constellation
of
forces
in the field. The final consummatory action conforms
to
the resultant
of
these forces
and reduces the tensions in the person, leading to
a
momentary equilibrium in the field.?’
Lewin’s inclusion of motivational factors altered the orthodox Gestalt view of the
field. The tendency toward “good” Gestalt no longer was the sole organizing force in
the behavioral field; human drives, needs and intentions also were responsible for struc-
turing the total life space
of
the person. In positing
a
relationship between needs and
the cognitive structure
of
the field Lewin dissented from the Gestalt rule that the dynamics
of perceptual organization only inhere in the perceptual data themselves, and not in
the “eye of the beholder.”
48
MAX
VISSER
Without exaggeration it can be said that Lewin was by far the most successful
psychologist to come from Europe to the United States. While the Gestalt psychologists
in general changed the study
of
perception in the States, they suffered the handicap of
“being holistic prophets of theoretical psychology in [the] atomistic, relatively a-theoretic
wilderness [of behaviorism]
.””
Most Gestalt notions eventually merged and disappeared
in American mainstream psychology, yet they survived in social psychology, due to
Lewin’s influence. His field concept proved capable of infinite extension, and soon was
brought to bear on social processes like group cohesion, intragroup communication,
maintenance of group standards and intergroup
perception^.'^
Lewin’s impact was probably more due to his original experimentation and
stimulating personality than to the topological theories he espoused. Both in Iowa and
at M.1.T he influenced many important future American psychologists, among them
Dorwin Cartwright, Leon Festinger, Ronald Lippitt, Stanley Schachter, Kurt Back,
Harold Kelley,
John
Thibaut, Morton Deutsch and Albert Pepitone. His Research Center
for Group Dynamics soon became the central training center for mainstream social
psychologists. By the end of World War I1 “M.1.T was the center
of
the new look in
American social psychology, and when the Center [after Lewin’s death in
19471
moved
to the University
of
Michigan . . .
,
so
did the center of gravity of the field.”24
The establishment
of
the Center at Michigan provided a distinct Lewinian
background for the researchers who around that time became interested in the motiva-
tion
of
voting choices.
The involvement of the Survey Research Center (SRC) of the University of Michigan
in election studies occurred almost by accident. In
1948
the SRC conducted a survey
on public policy issues, which included one question on voting intentions for the presiden-
tial election that year. After Truman’s surprise victory, which equally upset his oppo-
nent Dewey and the established commercial pollsters, it turned out that only the SRC
had correctly gauged the mood of the nation. The Social Science Research Council
established a Committee on Political Behavior to investigate the causes of the pollsters’
inaccurate predictions, and more general, to discuss the future of election studies. The
SRC, in turn, went back to their sample for
a
short post-election interview, eventually
resulting in the first Michigan contribution to electoral research
(The People Elect
a
Presi-
dent,
1952).
Early in
1952
the Carnegie Corporation issued
a
grant to the Committee
to fund
a
study
of
the
1952
U.S. Presidential elections, and the Committee commis-
sioned the SRC to carry out the research, reported two years later in
The Voter Decides.
The SRC brought to the study
of
voting a distinct outlook and experience in research.
The Center evolved out of the Division of Program Surveys
of
the U.S. Department
of
Agriculture, a governmental research unit that during the World War had investigated
consumer behavior. After the War the Division moved to Michigan and became the
SRC, first under the directorship of Rensis Likert, later under Angus Campbell.
Three important aspects stood out in the work of the SRC and its predecessor. First,
there was an emphasis on the measurement of attitudes and their origins in perceptions,
past experience and general motives, growing out of Likert’s early work on attitude scaling
and measurement. Second, the Center employed national probability samples in its
research designs, instead of the quota samples that the polling agencies had used in the
1948
elections forecasts. Finally, the SRC encouraged the use
of
open interview
questions.
25
Besides the research experience of the SRC, other factors influenced the formative
years of the first Michigan studies as well. In preparation
of
the
1952
election study
THE
PSYCHOLOGY
OF
VOTING
ACTION
49
SRC Director Campbell assembled a weekly seminar of scholars, in which plans for
the study were laid out and discussed. In this seminar there was a strong influence from
social psychologists M. Brewster Smith, Daniel Katz, Theodore Newcomb, Gerald Gurin
and Campbell himself, besides political scientists Warren Miller and George Belknap.
Additional important influences came from psychologists in the Research Center for
Group Dynamics, who carried the Lewinian emphasis on field psychology into the
Michigan works.26
The SRC was also influenced, but in a more negative sense, by the earlier election
research, including Lazarsfeld’s Erie County study. The Michigan group considered these
older studies for the greater part as a mere opinion demography, a relating
of
opinions
and attitudes to face sheet data like age, sex, education and socioeconomic status. This
method was given a sociological rationale in Lazarsfeld’s work, in which group member-
ship serves as the basis
of
political behavior. Such sociological approaches were held
to have little explanatory power: first, because shifts between the major parties generally
could be found in all social groups; second, because there was too little change in the
relative size
of
these groups to account for these shifts. Furthermore, the approaches
gave no important information on tbe factors that mediate between social characteristics
and the vote.”
From these positive and negative influences the SRC group developed a basic
Lewinian view
of
voting action. The voting action results from a field of socio-political
forces, a life space including the voter and the social-political world as it exists for him.
Inner needs and past experience will charge certain regions of the political life space
with positive valence and others with negative valence, setting up a field
of
forces direct-
ing voting action. Campbell et
al.
expressed this charging process in terms of attitudes,
defined as “orientations to the elements of national politics, seen by the voter as negative
or positive.”** When the attitudinal forces in the field are
so
distributed that a strong
resultant force in the direction
of
one candidate exists, the corresponding voting action
will occur without delay. When, however, the forces point in strongly divergent direc-
tions, the voter will vacillate between possible candidates and the consummatory voting
action will be postponed or even ~ancelled.’~
An influential part
of
the Michigan research was reserved for the analysis of the
cognitive structure
of
the socio-political field, i.e., the number
of
different elements that
exist for the voter and the degree to which he sees these elements as connected to one
another. It was found that these fields in general displayed relatively low levels of
organization (“levels of conceptualization” in the Michigan terminology); whatever
organization existed in the field could be largely contributed to the pervasive influence
of
party identification, the voter’s feeling of attachment to one of the parties.30
The publication
of
The American Voter
is generally viewed as a landmark point
in the study of voting action. The analyses provided by Angus Campbell, Converse,
Miller and Stokes are skillful1 and provoking, and
no
single study before or after it has
matched the scope and variety of the materials presented in
The American Voter.
Yet,
in spite of their claims to the contrary, the work of the Michigan researchers showed
a
fundamental continuity with the research by Lazarsfeld et al., as we will point out
in the final section.
IV.
THE Two SCHOOLS REVISITED: DISCUSSION
AND
CONCLUSIONS
In the previous pages we have discussed two distinct theories of voting action with
their psychological antecedents. It is often noted that the Columbia approach represents
50
MAX
VISSER
a mainly “sociological” view of voting behavior, while the Michigan model is more
“psychological” in nature. In this final section we will contend that there is much similarity
between the schools, both with regard to their psychological origins
as
to their principal
conclusions.
Regarded by their psychological origins, both schools essentially employ action
theories as the framework of analysis. Central to Lazarsfeld’s analysis of action was
an inquiry into the process in which a certain behavioral intention develops into
a
con-
summatory action; in the case of voting actions, perceptions of and attitudes towards
the elements
of
politics and influences from the voter’s social environment work to press
the vote intention into a voting action. At any time the action is seen as codetermined
by the state
of
the person and the state of the environment as he perceives it.
A
theory of action was also explicit in the (early) work of Lewin, who sought to
combine Freud‘s motivation theory and principles of Gestalt psychology in one dynamic
model. He conceived of person and environment as one field
of
forces, directly determin-
ing action. Lewin’s field theory laid the groundwork for the Michigan approach to voting
research, in whose view voting action directly conforms to the resultant force of
a
field
of forces, comprising the individual and the sociopolitical environment as he sees it.
Both schools thus combined motivational and cognitive aspects in their models, and both
schools admitted to explanations of voting action from the point
of
view
of
the voter.
The similarity in psychological origins is reflected in some of the major conclusions
of the Columbia and Michigan schools. Most importantly, there
is
a basic equivalence
between Michigan’s finding that a conflict of forces in the field will reduce or divert the
voting response and the Columbia conclusion that the occurrence of social and attitudinal
cross-pressures impedes implementation of a voting intention into a consummatory voting
action.” Further, the schools agree on the pervasive impact of the voter’s partisan loyalty
(or party identification) with respect to the resolution of conflicting attitudinal forces.32
Finally, there is also consensus on the important role of primary and secondary groups
in the establishment and maintenance of the voter’s partisan allegian~e.~~
Lazarsfeld has repeatedly pointed out basic similarities between his own and Lewin’s
approach. Like Lazarsfeld‘s attempts, Lewin’s early action research in Berlin covered
all aspects of the action sequence, holding out a promise of an integrated theory of goals,
intentions and occasions, which promise, however, had not been fulfilled.34 Lazarsfeld‘s
emphasis on implementation, “the way in which more or less vague dispositions, inten-
tions and interests . .
.
may lead .
.
. to the performance of
a
specific act like buying
a car, going on a trip, or voting for a candidate” is equivalent to Lewin’s notion
of
locomotion through psychological space.35 In a wider context, Lazarsfeld has called
attention to the fact that the Columbia school’s findings on group conformity pressures,
attitudinal cross-pressures and selective perception are comparable to the findings
of
Gestalt theorists concerning tendencies toward balancing in interpersonal relations and
dissonance reduction in
individual^.^^
The Michigan scholars, however, have consistently denied any similarity between
Lazarsfeld’s and their own approach. From the very beginning to the very last3’ they
have converted Lazarsfeld‘s theory into
a
sociological straw man, which could be knocked
down with
a
simple reference to the immobility of social characteristics in the face of
important political changes. We have indicated that
The
People’s
Choice
indeed suffered
from a certain amount of sociological onesidedness, yet the remaining discussion
of
Lazarsfeld’s work and ideas should also have made it clear that Michigan’s perception
of the Columbia research suffers form serious distortion.
THE
PSYCHOLOGY
OF
VOTING
ACTION
51
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I
wish to thank Jacques Thomassen, Kees Aarts, Erwin Seydel (University of
Twente), Warren Miller (Arizona State University) and the editor and anonymous referees
of the
Journal
of
the History
of
the Behavioral Sciences
for their valuable comments
on earlier drafts of this paper.
I
am also indebted to Pete Rowland and Lawrence
Wrightsman for their guidance in the field
of
psychology during my stay at the Univer-
sity
of
Kansas,
1989-1990.
Financial support for this research from the Netherlands
Organization for the Advancement of Research
(NWO)
is gratefully acknowledged (grant
nr .
430-2 14-032).
NOTES
1. The Bureau of Applied Social Research that Lazarsfeld founded at Columbia and headed for three decades
was in many aspects the successor of the “Forschungsstelle.” See Paul F. Lazarsfeld, “Forty Years Later:
Foreword to the English Edition,” in Marie Jahoda, Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Hans Zeisel,
Marienthal. The
Sociography of an Unemployed Community
(Chicago: Aldine, 1971), p. xv; David L. Sills, “Lazarsfeld, Paul
F.”, in
International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences
Vol. 18, David L. Sills, Ed. (NY: MacMillan
&
Free
Press, 1979), p. 412; Hans Zeisel, “L’kole viennoise des recherches de motivation,”
Revue franqaise de sociologie
9 (1968): 3-12.
2. Sills, “Lazarsfeld,” p. 417.
3.
4. Paul F. Lazarsfeld et al.,
Jugend und Beruf. Kritik und Material
(Jena: Fischer, 1931), p. 28.
Paul F. Lazarsfeld, “The Psychological Aspect of Market Research,”
Harvard Business Review
13 (1934):
54-71; Arthur Kornhauser and Paul F. Lazarsfeld, “The Analysis
of
Consumer Actions,” in
The Language
of SocialResearch,
Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Moms Rosenberg, Eds. (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1955), pp. 392-419.
5.
Kornhauer
&
Lazarsfeld, “The Analysis of Consumer Actions,” pp. 394, 395.
6. Lazarsfeld, “Psychological Aspect,” p. 61; see also Paul
F.
Lazarsfeld, “Reflections
on
Business,”
American
Journalof Sociology
65 (1959): 2-5; for a general methodological introduction Hans Zeisel,
Say It with Figures,
6th ed. (NY: Harper
&
Row, 1985), pp. 186-203. Lazarsfeld has extensively reviewed his own action research
in “Historical Notes on the Empirical Study of Action: An Intellectual Odyssey,” in his
Qualitative and Quan-
titative Analysis. Historicaland Critical Essays
(Boston: Allyn
&
Bacon, 1972), pp. 53-105, and in “Working
with Merton,” in
The Idea of Social Structure. Papers in Honor of Robert
K.
Merton,
Lewis A. Coser, Ed.
(NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), pp. 45-56.
7. The circumstances surrounding the 1940 study are fully documented in Peter H. Rossi, “Four Land-
marks in Voting Research,” in
American Voting Behavior,
Eugene Burdick and Arthur
J.
Brodtbeck, Eds.
(Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1959), pp. 15-20.
8.
Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Bernard R. Berelson and Hazel Gaudet,
The People’s Choice, How the Voter Makes
up his Mind in a Presidential Campaign.
2nd ed. (NY: Columbia University Press, 1948), pp. 16ff.
9. Ibid., pp. 137ff.
10. Ibid., pp. 73ff, 150ff.
11. Ibid., pp. 56ff.
12. Ibid., p. 27. Part of this onesideness was undoubtedly due to the still nascent state of academic sociology
and psychology at that time; having been deprived
of
his own model
of
action, there was little work for
Lazarsfeld to fall back upon (Rossi, “Four Landmarks,” p. 23).
13. Rossi, “Four Landmarks,” pp. 24-26.
14. Bernard R. Berelson, Paul F. Lazarsfeld and William N. McPhee,
Voting. A Study of Opinion Forma-
tion in a Presidential Campaign
(Chicago: University
of
Chicago Press, 1954), pp. 77ff.
15. Ibid., pp. 118ff, 182ff.
16. Ibid., pp. 215-233.
17. Most important in this respect was a collaborative effort
of
four Columbia researchers toward a com-
parative study
of
the social psychology
of
voting, which resulted in a long review article (Seymour M. Lipset,
Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Allen
H.
Barton and Juan
J.
Linz, “The Psychology
of
Voting. An Analysis of Political
Behavior,” in
Handbook of Social Psychology,
Vol. 11, Gardner Lindzey, Ed. (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley,
1954), pp. 1124-1 175) and in three chapters in Seymour M. Lipset,
Political Man. The Social Buses of Politics,
exp. ed. (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1981), pp. 183-300.
18. Sills, “Lazarsfeld,” p. 415.
52
MAX
VISSER
19. Jean M. Mandler and George Mandler, “The Diaspora of Experimental Psychology: the Gestaltists and
Others,” in
The Intellectual Migration. Europe and America,
1930-1960,
Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn,
Eds. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), pp. 399-405.
20.
Edwin
G.
Boring,
A History of Experimental Psychology,
2nd ed. (NY: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1950),
pp. 714,723; Heinz Heckhausen,
Motivation and Action
(Berlin: Springer, 1991), pp. 29, 118, 124, 127; David
Rapaport, Ed.,
Organization and Pathology of Thought. Selected Sources
(NY: Columbia University Press,
1951), pp. 95 n.1, 117 11.54.
21. For
an
early principal statement
of
the field theory of action
see
Kurt
Lewin,
Vorsatz, Wile undBedurfnis.
Mit Vorbemerkungen
uber
die psychischen Krqfte und Energien und uber die Struktur der Seele
(Berlin: Springer,
1926). An abridged English version
of
this paper appeared in Willis D. Ellis, Ed.,
A Source
Book
of Gestalt
Psychology
(London: Routledge
&
Kegan Paul, 1938), pp. 283-299, and
a
full translation in three separate
pieces in
Kurt
Lewin,
A Dynamic Theory of Personality. Selected Papers
(NY: McGraw-Hill, 1939, pp. 43-65,
and in Rapaport,
Organization and Pathology,
pp. 76-94, 95-153. See
for
later applications Kurt Lewin,
Field Theory in Social Science. Selected Theoretical Papers
(NY: Harper
&
Row, 1951).
22. Thomas H. Leahy,
A History ofModern Psychology
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1991), p. 76.
23. See Lewin’s own applications in his
Resolving Social Conflicts. Selected Papers
on
Group
Dynamics
(NY: Harper
&
Row, 1948), and his “Group Decision and Social Change,” in
Readings in SocialPsychology,
3rd ed., Eleanor E. Maccoby, Theodore M. Newcomb and Eugene L. Hartley, Eds. (NY: Holt, Rinehart
&
Winston, 1958), pp. 174-183.
For
a review
see
Morton Deutsch, “Field Theory,” in
International Encyclopedia,
Vol.
5,
Sills, Ed., pp. 406-417.
24. Mandler
&
Mandler, “The Diaspora,” p.
405.
25. For more extensive reviews
on
the background of the SRC, see Rensis Likert, “The Sample Interview
Survey as
a
Tool
of
Research and Policy Formation,” in
The Policy Sciences,
Daniel Lerner and Harold D.
Lasswell, Eds. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1951), pp. 234-239; Warren E. Miller, “An Organiza-
tional History of the Intellectual Origins of the American National Election Studies” (paper presented at the
Conference on the History
of
Election Studies, University
of
Tente, 1990); Rossi, “Four Landmarks,” pp.
36-38; M. Brewster Smith, “Opinions, Personality, and Political Behavior,”
American Political Science Review
26.
Angus Campbell, Philip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller and Donald
E.
Stokes,
The American Voter
(NY: Wiley, 1960), pp. 33ff; Miller, “An Organizational History,” p. 9.
27. Angus Campbell, Gerald Gurin and Warren E. Miller,
The Voter Decides
(Evanston, IL: Row
&
Peter-
son,
1954), pp. 84-86; Campbell et al.,
The American Voter,
pp. 17,36-37, 43,64-66; Morris Janowitz and
Warren E. Miller, “The Index of Political Predisposition in the 1948 Elections,”
Journal of Politics
14 (1952):
28. Campbell et al.,
The American Voter,
p. 66.
29. Campbell et al.,
The VoterDecides,
pp. 87, 157ff, 181-184; Campbell et al.,
The American Voter,
pp. 76ff.
30. Campbell et al.,
The American Voter,
pp. 168ff; Philip E. Converse, ‘The Nature
of
Belief Systems
in Mass Publics,” in
Ideology and Discontent,
David E. Apter, Ed. (NY: Free Press, 1964), pp. 206-261.
31. Compare Berelson et al.,
Voting,
pp. 118ff, 182ff; Lazarsfeld et
al.,
ThePeople’s Choice,
pp. xxxiii-Xwciv,
56ff; Lipset et al., “The Psychology of Voting,” pp. 1154-1 155,
to
Campbell et al.,
The Voter Decides,
pp.
87, 157ff, 181-184; Campbell et
al.,
The American Voter,
pp. 76ff.
32. Compare Lazarsfeld et al.,
The People’s Choice,
pp. xxxvi-xxxvii; Lipset et al., “The Psychology of
Voting,” pp. 1160-1164,
to
Campbell et
al.,
The American Voter,
pp. 120ff.
33. Compare Berelson et al.,
Voting,
pp. 54ff; Lazarsfeld et al.,
The People’s Choice,
pp. 16ff, 137ff; Lipset
et al., “The Psychology of Voting,” pp. 1144-1150, to Campbell et al.,
The Voter Decides,
pp. 199ff; Camp-
bell et al.,
The American Voter,
pp. 61-63, 76-77, 146ff, 295ff.
34. Lazarsfeld, “Historical Notes,” pp. 67-76.
35. Berelson et al.,
Voting,
pp. 278-279; Lazarsfeld et al.,
The People’s Choice,
p. 163
n.
2.
36. Berelson et al.,
Voting,
pp. 284-285.
37. Compare for example Janowitz and Miller, “The Index,” pp. 71 1-713, and J. Merril Shanks and War-
ren E. Miller, “Policy Direction and Performance Evaluation: Complementary Explanations
of
the Reagan
Elections,”
British Journal
of
Political Science
20 (1990): 149-150.
52 (1958): 6-9.
710-727.
