The People's Choice - Paul F. Lazarsfeld

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Résumé :
The People?s Choice is a landmark psychological and statistical study of American voters during the 1940 and 1944 presidential elections, originally published in 1948. It constituted the first systematic effort to trace voters? behavior across the duration of a presidential campaign and to follow up on this data years later.

Biographie:
Paul F. Lazarsfeld (1901?1976) was a professor of sociology and the founder and director of the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University. He was one of the pioneering figures in the development of empirical sociology and social research.

Bernard Berelson (1912?1979) was the head of the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, the director of applied social research and a professor of sociology at Columbia University, and the president of the Population Council. With Lazarsfeld, he was a coauthor of Voting: A Study of Opinion Formation in a Presidential Campaign (1954).

Hazel Gaudet (1908?1975) was a social scientist who worked on the Radio Research Project at Princeton University, where she coauthored The Invasion from Mars (1940) with Lazarsfeld, before joining the Bureau of Applied Social Research. The American Political Science Association gives the Hazel Gaudet Erskine Political Psychology Career Achievement Award to honor remarkable people in the field of political psychology.

Sommaire:
Preface to the Third Edition
Preface to the Second Edition
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
2. Erie County, Ohio, 1940
3. Social Differences Between Republicans and Democrats
4. Ideological Differences Between Republicans and Democrats
5. Participation in the Election
6. Time of Final Decision
7. The Types of Changes
8. The Activation Effect
9. The Reinforcement Effect
10. The Conversion Effect
11. The Over-All Effect of the Campaign
12. Anticipation of the Winner
13. What the Voters Were Told
14. The Radio and the Printed Page
15. The Political Homogeneity of Social Groups
16. The Nature of Personal Influence
Notes
Appendix: Construction of Indices