G Overning with the P Olls a My F Ried and D Ouglas B

© 2010 Phi Alpha Theta G OVERNING WITH THE P OLLS A MY F RIED AND D OUGLAS B. HARRIS INTRODUCTION During the 2000 presidential campaign and the early years of his presidency, President George W. Bush purported to be a politician who was not interested in public opinion polls. As part of this image-making, Bush presented himself as different from his predecessor, President Bill Clinton, who was known as a consumer of polling data and was portrayed as unusual in this regard. President Bush’s team also meant to evoke an image of Bush as a leader who set out his own path to presidential achievement regardless of public sentiment. Yet the Bush administration used polls quite a bit, developing language to promote its policy agenda.1 For instance, under President George W. Bush, one rhetorical move generated by opinion researchers was the refiguring of the estate tax as the “death tax.” By the same token, the narrative about President Clinton both disregarded cases of him acting contrary to the polls and overlooked the decades-long practice by previous elected officials to govern with the polls. In fact, the use of quantitative public opinion data in politics and government dates back to the 1930s. During this decade, electoral campaign strategists, administrators in government agencies, and presidential advisors gathered and used information from polls. To be sure, during these early years and beyond, citizens and legislators voiced their suspicion and dislike of polls. However, as polling for politics, academic analysis, and market research grew over the decades, public opinion studies became increasingly common in government. By the turn of the twenty-first century, bureaucrats and politicians in the United States were governing with the polls. Amy Fried is Associate Professor of Political Science and Associate Dean, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Maine. Among her recent journal articles are, “The Forgotten Lindsay Rogers and the Development of American Political Science” (American Political Science Review) and “The Personalization of Collective Memory: The Smithsonian’s September 11 Exhibit” (Political Communication). Douglas B. Harris (Ph.D. Johns Hopkins University) is Associate Professor of Political Science and Assistant Director of the Honors Program at Loyola University Maryland. Along with three colleagues, he is co-author of The Austin-Boston Connection: Fifty Years of House Democratic Leadership, published by Texas A&M University Press. 1. Joshua Green,”The Other War Room,” Washington Monthly, April 2002 (available at http:// www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0204.green.html, accessed 31 December 2009); Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, “Words vs. Deeds President George W. Bush and Polling,” The Brookings Review 21, 2003: 32–5. hisn_264 321..353 322 THE H ISTORIAN This article explores the growth of polling in governance settings and demon- strates that public opinion polls were technological tools crafted to achieve institutional goals and incorporated into institutional settings. In doing so, we make five arguments, primarily supported by evidence from the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt and from the Congresses that gathered in the final decades of the twentieth century. Our first argument is that while polls have been increasingly used in governance settings, they were adopted unevenly, with the president and executive branch using them earlier and Congress adopting them later. Fran- klin D. Roosevelt’s administration turned to pollsters decades before George W. Bush’s staff used opinion data to label the estate tax the “death tax.” Developed in the private sector, polls migrated from marketing and advertising to government agencies and presidents’ offices and then to Congress as networks of polling professionals progressively developed techniques and institutionalized means of gathering and using opinion data. Quantitative-opinion researchers surveyed opinions to discern respondents’ motivations and psychological states as commer- cial and then political actors sought to understand and influence them. Second, we argue that the adoption of polls was supported by organizational and institutional dynamics involving the building of networks and polling appa- rata by skilled and innovative polling pioneers. This explanation complements recent prominent accounts of polling’s rise that have stressed cultural aspects to account for their diffusion. Not discounting these accounts, we contend that institutional elements were also important and employ concepts from the school of thought that has been dubbed new institutionalism to explain these developments. In applying this perspective, we depict early networks composed of mar- keters, the nascent polling industry and academic survey researchers, as well as networks in federal bureaucracies. Furthermore, this institutionalist lens focuses on how initial technological developments—in particular, the quantitative turn in opinion measurement—blazed a path followed by others. Individuals in these early bureaucratic networks assisted each other in developing polling operations and used polls to advise President Roosevelt and, via the Department of Agricul- ture and the War Department in the 1930s and 1940s, to plan and carry out policy endeavors. When decades later polling was adopted by congressional leaders, surveying methods were far better established than in the initial period and once reluctant legislative leaders turned for assistance to professional pollsters with ties to business, candidates, and political parties. Third, we contend that the growing use of polls by presidents’ executive offices and administrative agencies was part of a larger pattern contributing to the building of the American state, a project begun in the Progressive era that gained G OVERNING W ITH THE P OLLS 323 momentum during the New Deal and World War II. Gathering data by way of polls served a variety of strategic purposes for a burgeoning American state, such as designing more effective policies, preventing resistance by the public to federal intervention that affected local and traditional practices, and shaping Presidential rhetoric aimed at persuasion. As the American state became an increasingly powerful entity across the country and globally, executive branch actors found it worthwhile to use polling data as they planned rhetorical strategies to appeal to the public through the media of the day. Fourth, the later adoption of polls by Congress was part of a shift toward plebiscitary politics that, like the rise of administrative politics, had its roots in the Progressive movement.2 In the party-dominated and highly segmented regional politics of the nineteenth century, members of Congress were apt both to consider party mediation as the proper intermediary that separated them from direct popular sentiment and to be suspicious of nationalizing movements. Congress’s long-standing and implicit institutional norms, developed in this context, under- went a shift after Progressive reforms and an increasingly nationalized politics weakened political party organizations.3 Although the full measure of the Pro- gressives’ impact would be felt only over time, increasingly throughout the twentieth century, members of Congress abandoned these older conceptions of party allegiance as well as the Burkean notions that legislators were trustees and that Congress itself was the public voice. Consistent with the new plebiscitary politics, individual members of Congress adopted new practices of polling along with a more democratic view of their representative roles. By the 1970s, deeming this new technology both more appropriate and more reliable, Congressional leaders and backbenchers were also drawn toward polls as a weapon in institutional combat as they sought to counter Presidents from the opposition party and operate in a new media environment which readily incorporated rhetoric contes- tation involving stylized, poll-tested talking points. Fifth, through most of this period, the increased legitimacy of polling made public opinion itself more “real” and legitimate and politicians used polls for multiple political purposes, ranging far beyond simply counting how many citizens planned on voting for a candidate or supporting certain policies. Actors in these institutions increasingly viewed public opinion and perceptions of public opinion as a political resource and were interested in both having citizens on their 2. See Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920, New York: Hill and Wang, 1967. 3. See Sidney M. Milkis, Political Parties and Constitutional Government: Remaking American Democracy, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999. 324 THE H ISTORIAN side and being able to convince others (in some cases, with rather strained uses of poll data) that their interpretations of public opinion were correct. Polls were used in efforts to construct a view of public opinion that would serve political purposes.4 The surveying professionals assisted in creating consequential public opinion through their crafting of questions and responses. Because every proposal can be described in many different ways, there is no singular or scientific way of wording a poll question regarding any particular policy. Moreover, presidential advisors, campaign operatives, and political advisors employ polls with split- samples (with different groups of respondents responding to distinctive ways of describing a policy) so that politicians can learn which wording garners popular support or opposition. Over time,

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