This project examines how political opinion polling—as a new way of knowing the public—shaped American ways of thinking about society and politics from the Depression era of the 1930s to today. The project provides new knowledge and understanding of the profound impact of partisan interpretations of public opinion polls on the development of ideological polarization and the polarization of worldviews in the modern Unites States. Scholars and the reading public will, as a result of this project, better understand the significance of modern opinion polling for the construction of worldviews, ideologies, and polarization in the modern West. The study combines the methods of intellectual history with perspectives from the social sciences, and uses an extensive amount of published and unpublished sources, including newspapers, magazines, and archive material. The site of research is the University of Oulu, Finland, and the project includes three longer research visits to the United States.

2024

2028