Introduction

After staging the stakes of the mid-century turn towards psychography in W.H. Auden’s “The Unknown Citizen,” the Introduction provides a pre-history of “psychography,” a term coined in the Victorian Era to describe a series of disparate practices of recording and materializing individual psychology. These practices—including telepathic communication, automatic writing, and the literary methods of Stracheyan psychobiography—demonstrate “mind-writing” as an emergent literary concern long before the invention of modern polling. Even in this protean stage of psychography, writers worried these new practices might empower malignant actors to weaponize psychographic power against the nation. Invoking Bram Stoker’s Dracula as an exemplar of this phenomenon, I highlight that the vampire frightens not only because he will feed on London’s “teeming millions,” but also because his infectious power will “create a new and ever-widening circle of semi-demons.” In effect, Dracula weaponizes his telepathic power to execute psychological control over the masses. At the time Stoker was writing his novel, the science of public opinion was understood by sociologists only through such tropes of spiritualism, disease, and contagion. The chapter traces the transformation of this early modernist vision of psychographics to its reprisal in the mid-century institutionalization of public opinion polling, using Auden as a touchstone to demonstrate the radical and rapid institutionalization of group psychology into everyday discourse and institutions.

Public Opinion Polling in Mid-Century British Literature

Whereas modernist writers lauded the consecrated realm of subjective interiority, mid-century writers were engrossed by the materialization of the collective mind. An obsession with group thinking was fueled by the establishment of academic sociology and the ubiquitous infiltration of public opinion research into a bevy of cultural and governmental institutions. As authors witnessed the materialization of the once-opaque realm of public consciousness for the first time, their writings imagined the potentialities of such technologies for the body politic. Polling opened new horizons for mass politics. Public Opinion Polling in Mid-Century British Literature: The Psychographic Turn traces this most crucial period of group psychology’s evolution—the mid-century—when “psychography,” a term originating in Victorian spiritualism, transformed into a scientific praxis. The imbrication of British writers within a growing institutionalized public opinion infrastructure bolstered an aesthetic turn towards collectivity and an interest in the political ramifications of meta-psychological discourse. Examining works by H.G. Wells, Evelyn Waugh, Val Gielgud, Olaf Stapledon, Virginia Woolf, Naomi Mitchison, Celia Fremlin, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Elizabeth Bowen, this book utilizes extensive archival research to trace the embeddedness of writers within public opinion institutions, providing a new explanation for the new “material” turn so often associated with interwar writing.

Iceland's Pirate Party (Píratar) – In Permanent Opposition?

This research examines the rapid growth in popularity of Iceland’s Pirate Party (Piratur) by analyzing recent election results and public opinion polling (2013-17) on the popularity and ideological placement of the Pirate Party. We find that most respondents viewed the Pirate Party as centrist, and the majority of the respondents were neutral in their view of the party, although negative assessments rose by 2017.

Using Opinion Polling Data to Replicate Non-Experimental Quantitative Results Across Time and Space: An Exploration of Attitudes Surrounding School Desegregation and Resegregation Policies

A renewed call for replications has emerged in social science research. An important form of replication involves exploring the extent to which findings from a given study hold in other contexts. This study draws on opinion polling data to replicate key findings across time and space based on an original study in one location analyzing attitudes toward public school assignment policies. The replication finds that many of the original findings hold, though one important exception reflects the changing context. We note that the increasing availability of relatively inexpensive methods of quantitative data production facilitates replication and comment on how the temporal interval between the original study and the replication may influence the extent to which findings replicate. We argue that largely successful replications help to clarify the conditions under which findings replicate, and that sociologists are in the early stages of determining which strategies work best for replicating which findings.

American and Chinese Public Opinion in an Era of Great Power Competition

As US-China great power competition intensifies, public opinion polling may help gauge internal drivers of foreign policy decision-making. Using Pew Research Center data, we analyzed how Americans and Chinese perceived their own and each other’s countries between 2008-2016. We also compared these samples’ perceptions of current economic and future superpower leadership. While Chinese evaluated China more favorably than Americans evaluated the US, they also evaluated the US more favorably than Americans evaluated China. Among Americans, on average, Republicans viewed China less favorably and the US more favorably than Independents or Democrats. Although Chinese consistently viewed the US as the current economic leader, Chinese became increasingly optimistic about China’s prospects for future superpower preeminence over time. Conversely, American perceptions of America’s future status as a leading superpower became increasingly pessimistic over time, especially for Republicans and Independents. Republicans and Independents were also more optimistic about US economic leadership under Republican presidents, while Democrat perceptions were more consistent over time. We discuss our findings’ implications for US-China great power competition and in view of psychological theory.

The Labour Party leadership election: The Stark model and the selection of Keir Starmer

This article considers the selection of Keir Starmer as the new Leader of the Labour Party within the context of the Stark model for explaining leadership election outcomes. The article seeks to achieve three objectives. First, to provide an overview of the nomination stages and the candidates who contested the Labour Party leadership election. Second, to provide an analysis of the underlying academic assumptions of the Stark model on leadership selection and to assess its value as an explanatory model. Third, to use opinion-polling evidence to consider the selection of Starmer in relation to the criteria of the Stark model—i.e. that party leadership (s)electorates are influenced by the following hierarchy of strategic goals: acceptability or select the candidate most likely to unify the party; electability or select the candidate most likely to expand the vote base of the party; and competence or select the candidate most likely to be able to implement their policy objectives.

Political Opinion Formation as Epistemic Practice: The Hashtag Assemblage of #metwo

The article contributes to the literature on the political use of hashtags. We argue that hashtag assemblages could be understood in the tradition of representing public opinion through datafication in the context of democratic politics. While traditional data-based epistemic practices like polls lead to the ‘passivation’ of citizens, in the digital constellation this tendency is currently challenged. In media like Twitter, hashtags serve as a technical operator to order the discursive fabrication of diverse publicly articulated opinions that manifest in the assemblage of tweets, algorithms and criticisms. We conceptualize such a critical public as an epistemic sensorium for dislocations based on the expression of experienced social imbalances and its political amplification. On the level of opinion formation, this constitutes a process of democratization, allowing for the expression of diverse opinions and issues even under singular hashtags. Despite this diversity, we see a strong tendency of publicly relevant actors such as news outlets to represent digital forms of opinion expression as unified movements. We argue that this tendency can partly be explained by the affordances of networked media, relating the process of objectification to the network position of the observer. We make this argument empirically plausible by applying methods of network analysis and topic modelling to a dataset of 196,987 tweets sampled via the hashtag #metwo that emerged in the German Twittersphere in the summer of 2018 and united a discourse concerned with racism and identity. In light of this data, we not only demonstrate the hashtag assemblage’s heterogeneity and potential for subaltern agency; we also make visible how hashtag assemblages as epistemic practices are inherently dynamic, distinguishing it from opinion polling through the limited observational capacities and active participation of the actors representing its claims within the hybrid media system.