The American Mass Public in the Early Cold War Years

The study of individual-level public opinion and behavior has flourished in recent decades. But the understanding of the dynamics of mass opinion prior to the 1950s has been undermined by the absence of high-quality, individual-level data. The surveys from this time have not been exploited by the social science community because they are not easily usable. The data often contains numerous miscodings and other errors. In addition, the surveys employed now-discredited quota sampling procedures. 

Over the last seven years, the principal investigators have, with the assistance of a grant from the NSF, worked to resuscitate over 400 opinion polls from the 1936 to 1945 period. These data have proven to be an extremely valuable resource. 

This new project will make available to the social science research community a trove of public opinion data that has largely been ignored in the past. The PIs will extend their previous work in two ways. First, they will compile and produce readily usable computer files for roughly 350 public opinion polls undertaken from late 1945 through 1952. Second, they will improve upon methods appropriate for analyzing public opinion data collected through quota sampling. These methods will be applied to create a consistent set of survey weights that will cover the entire 1936-1952 period.

Recovering this early opinion data promises to illuminate critical questions concerning the role of the mass public in the political system. The public opinion polls from this time contain a plethora of valuable items measuring attitudes concerning economic policy, racial relations, and U.S. policy towards the Soviet Union and China. The PIs will use the polling data to determine how the mass public guided and reacted to the realignment on civil rights issues. The data will help understand the dynamics of change as economic liberalism, Democratic partisanship, and racial liberalism gradually became connected at the mass level. The PIs will also use the opinion data on foreign policy as a resource for examining the nature of the public?s reaction to the Korean War and the other major events of the early Cold War. 

The project will have broad social value. It promises to expand the field of political behavior by promoting the study of historical public opinion. It will provide to the community of scholars a wealth of individual-level opinion data in the pre-Eisenhower era, allowing researchers to gain new insights into an array of substantively important topics.