Humane Politics and Methods of Inquiry

Ithiel de Sola Pool, Ithiel de Sola Pool

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351514293
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

Ithiel de Sola Pool was a distinguished scholar of the political process, and one of the most original thinkers in the development of an integrated social science. This volume focuses upon his contributions to the development of research methods that deepen our understanding of human behavior.

The book is divided into five parts treating the analysis of communications, computer simulation, forecasting, network theory, and the social sciences in political contexts. The first part considers the problems and possibilities of analysis raised by the unprecedented quantity of data made available by widespread and improved communications technology; what should be counted and how should inferences be made. Part two explores computer simulation in the study of presidential election patterns and how it can provide in-depth analyses of crisis situations in history. Part three focuses on strategies for predicting the future of international politics and methods to forecast the impacts of new communications technologies, while part four offers a rigorous analysis of domestic and global contact networks and the so-called "small world" phenomenon.

Part five is concerned with external challenges to the use of social science to create more humane politics, including the question of value neutrality, ideology, "deconstructive" critical theory, and threats by government to the health of universities. In a concluding essay Lloyd Etheredge draws upon Pool's work to discuss several new ways in which the methods treated in this volume can be applied to contemporary social change.

Part I

The Analysis of Communications

Editor’s Introduction

“Content analysis is a systematic and rigorous way of doing what humanistic students of ideas and behavior have always done, namely, to look at what symbols are used in a body of text. Such observations of the flows of symbols become content analysis or social science if some attention is paid to the procedures of observation.”¹

—Ithiel Pool [pp. 21–22, below]

“In its contribution to man’s life in society, content analysis is at one with all the social sciences. In general it may be said that the social sciences are the humanities of our era. In previous times scholars considered it part of their role to be teachers of princes. They saw themselves as taming the violence of man’s untutored nature by instilling in their young charges the quality of reason and the humane heritage of the liberal arts.

Today the social sciences are our best tools for understanding each other’s human passions, motives, and plans. They are our most effective instrument for handling man’s greatest problem, organized violence.… It is the social sciences that best help us understand the conditions by which a group may achieve consensus, the basis of psychopathological disturbances, the needs of minorities for respect…^”

—Ithiel Pool [pp. 19–20, below]

The scientific analysis of political communications arose as the new technologies of mass communications (newspapers, radio, motion pictures) were used by governments for propaganda, by revolutionary leaders to organize mass followings, and by democracies for daily politics and policy discussion. Content analysis, as it is called, was an evolving set of methods to observe and understand the public political process, including the spread of emotion-charged ideas and words (“symbols”) across national boundaries.

Content analysis also promises deeper and more powerful insights than merely observing the surface of what is being said. Ithiel Pool, Harold Lasswell, Nathan Leites, Alexander George, Irving Janis, and many other social science pioneers who were Pool’s contemporaries were fascinated by psychoanalysis and underwent personal psychoanalysis. They were never persuaded to promote Sigmund Freud’s particular clinical hypotheses, but they were hooked on the possibility of making inferences, from streams of talk, about the deeper organizing principles, images, and emotions that lay behind it. They hoped, someday, to both listen—and understand—individuals, group behavior, and even the logic of other cultures more powerfully by new methods that could be made explicit and steadily improved.

In the beginning, Ithiel Pool counted words (e.g., emotionallycharged political symbols like “democracy.”) And in the so-called RADIR Project he and his associates recorded 105,000 occurrences of 415 symbols in 20,000 editorials from five countries across a sixtyyear period. The work (conducted from 1948–1953) was done by hand: eventually, they set aside further research because the available technology was too laborious and expensive, and computers lacked the power and memory to analyze such large datasets with sophistication. Today, improvements in scanning technology, and the growing power and memory of desktop computers, make it feasible to convert thousands (and even millions) of words to electronic form at affordable cost. Content analysis is a method whose time has come. But the unprecedented quantity of data available raised then—and especially raises today—the question of what should be counted, and how inferences should be made?²

“Symbols, Meaning, and Social Science”

The first selection explores the problem of inference. As Ithiel describes, it can be useful to count words, obtain frequency distributions, and know that the word “democracy” began to capture imaginations in a certain historical period, and that it become so highly esteemed that almost everybody began to claim their political loyalties as “democratic” and to describe their revolutions as “democratic” or a “people’s” revolution. But this initial statistical analysis only begins to understand what is being said, and what is being heard, when we observe that the term is used. The analysis of co-occurrences, that Pool recommends to his audience, is one of the tasks that is becoming feasible on a large scale.

“Content Analysis and the Intelligence Function”

Harold Lasswell, an early leader in the development of content analysis, was Ithiel Pool’s teacher at the University of Chicago. During World War II, Ithiel Pool worked as Lasswell’s research assistant in Washington, DC to study Nazi propaganda. They continued a lifelong friendship. This second selection is drawn from a volume honoring Harold Lasswell’s work: It provides a good historical overview of the development of content analysis and a discussion of the vision, that they shared, of producing a more thoughtful and well-informed basis for democratic decision making, and a humane politics, than the domestic and world politics, aswirl with demagoguery, impassioned rhetoric, and the threat of violence that they had inherited.

“Scratches on Our Minds: Beliefs, Stereotypes, and Images”

In applied settings (e.g., advertising) marketing researchers pay keen attention to the properties, flow, and change of images. The early social sciences, however, favored the concept of “attitude” as a more central explanation in social psychology. Thus many attitudes are measured [e.g., the extent of agreeing or disagreeing with a statement, on a 7–point scale.] but the types and properties of imagery (e.g., that ideologues have of government) still remain relatively terra incognito. This third selection honors the work of several theorists, including the former journalist Harold Isaacs whose interviewing methods, emphasis upon images, and (resulting) astute psychological observations Ithiel Pool admired.

Especially, Ithiel Pool felt that attention to images (going deeper than words alone) could enrich the explanatory power of social science by including—in a readily accessible way—some of the dynamics investigated by psychoanalysts.³ Isaacs’ observations about unrecognized splitting of national stereotypes (e.g., fond images of India and Indians might co-occur with suspicion of China and the Chinese) alerted Pool’s clinical sensibility.⁴

Notes

1. For a related discussion see Robert E. Lane, The liberties of wit: Humanism, criticism, and the civic mind. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961).

2. The interested reader should consult, for more extensive discussions, Ithiel de Sola Pool (ed.), Trends in content analysis (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1959), and especially Pool’s summary essay, partly reproduced in Lloyd S. Etheredge (ed.), Politics in wired nations: Selected writings of Ithiel de Sola Pool. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998), pp. 119–158 and the useful overviews by Ole Holsti, especially “Content analysis,” in G. Lindzey and E. Aronson (eds.) Handbook of social psychology (Reading, MA: Addison—Wesley, 1968), vol. 2, pp. 596–692 and his Content analysis for the social sciences and humanities. (New York: Random House, 1969).

3. See also Lloyd S. Etheredge (ed.), op. cit., pp. 10–11 and Ithiel de Sola Pool and Irwin Shulman, “Newsman’s fantasies, audiences, and newswriting,” reprinted in ibid., pp. 29–45.

4. It would be straightforward to suggest that similar rules of “splitting” hero v. villain properties may exist in ideological images in domestic politics. For example, liberal activists imagining a benevolent government paired with the evil image of selfish businessmen; conservatives holding the heroic image of businessmen entrepreneurs paired with the evil image of a restrictive do-nothing government bureaucracy.

1

Symbols, Meanings, and Social Science

Introduction

This paper deals with meanings in the natural language—that is, the language used by ordinary men in everyday parlance. How can we go about studying what a vague value symbol like democracy means to the men who use it? In this paper we propose that one way to study the meaning of a symbol to those who use it is to tabulate the syndromes of other symbols in which it occurs. This procedure, which we shall illustrate with reference to symbols referring to the value, democracy, is a kind of content analysis designed to facilitate the empirical study of values.¹

It is a commonplace that the word, “democracy,” means all things to all men. The Soviets call their tyranny a democratic dictatorship, while we defend individual freedom in the name of democracy. We hear about so-called democratic art and democratic education. Even some churches explain their time-honored doctrines as expressions of democracy.

When a word comes to be used this loosely purists or pedants are tempted to discard it. They call it “meaningless” or “nonsense.” They dismiss it as simply a camouflage for personal preferences. They assert that “democratic” is simply a synonym for “desirable,” and “undemocratic” a synonym for “undesirable.”

This position is clearly wrong. When John Doe uses the word, “democratic,” he is almost always adding some bits of information which would be lost if he used the word “undesirable” instead. If he says that he opposes regressive taxes because they are undemocratic, we suspect the following bits of information which we would not have suspected if he had simply said that they are undesirable. We suspect that relative equality is a fairly important value to John Doe. We suspect that he considers economic equality as relevant to political status. We suspect that he is more concerned with or aware of the political effects of regressive taxes than of their effects on the level of national income. If he had used the word, “undesirable,” we could not have confidently guessed any of these things. In short, given some knowledge of the context, the word, “democracy,” imparts to us some vague bits of information.

For an empirical study of meanings the problem is to determine and specify the meanings which men in any given context embody in a given symbol. That is a different problem from that of establishing philosophical truths about democracy, and from the problem of determining what coherent and logical thinkers mean by it. It is rather to establish what groups of laymen vaguely and implicitly mean by it.

For scholars this is a relatively new kind of problem. It is a kind of problem which emerged historically together with the modern democratic state and with social science. The simultaneous emergence of these three things—modern democracy, the empirical study of language and social science—is no chance coincidence. Each contributes in its way to the others.

Until modern times, scholars were not concerned with the crude, ignorant, banal statements of their “inferiors.” In aristocratic and class societies wherein the intellectual development of an elite rested upon the life draining labor of a mass, only elite expressions seemed worthy of study. The linguistic problem for scholars was to find formulations in which statesmen, priests, and scholars could make effective, correct, and unambiguous statements and relate such statements one to another. The result was grammar, rhetoric, and logic, all disciplines concerned with the correct use of language. They are all disciplines which enable trained men to reach the goal of proper communication according to established norms. The Platonic dialectic sought to discover the norms by critically examining the actual usage of intellectuals, then called sophists. The Aristotelian method sought the norms in nature, partly independently of actual usage. But whether proper usage and semantic clarity were sought by consulting the authority of wise men or by studying nature, or both, the goal was still a normative one. The goal was to iron the bugs out of a specialized language by introducing more sophistication into its use by educated men.

Interest by scholars in the sayings and opinions of the humble became prominent first in the practical arts. In them, as Edgar Zilsel pointed out, it led in the sixteenth century to the development of modern science. In the sixteenth century, and whenever else in the history of civilization the buds of science have opened up, we can find the explanation in a reorientation by trained intellectuals toward the practical artisans. Science emerged when these two social strata began communicating. That is to say, it emerged when the scholar trained in the process of generalization came to feel it proper to be interested in the practical problems of the artisan and informed himself of the artisan’s lore of factual knowledge. From 1550 on, this process can be traced regarding such practical matters as pumping water, map making, determining longitude, etc.

Natural science thus emerged in the Renaissance when scholars began to listen to some of the things which artisans had to say. It was only much later that scholars became interested also in the style in which the masses talked. The arts and disciplines of expression were the last strongholds of aristocratic attitudes. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—though with exceptions—literature was the concern of the drawing room while science was the hobby of the burghers. I do not mean to minimize the exceptions—Milton is one outstanding one. But the remarkable study by Robert Merton of Science, Technology, and Society in 17th Century England establishes the statistical validity of this generalization. Interest in poetry and interest in science were negatively, not positively correlated. Men who grew up in the hothouse of Puritanism and commercialism went one way; those who were nurtured in aristocratic conservative climates went the other. Indeed, even today, teachers of language and literature still often reveal aristocratic values when they talk about good form and correct speech. But alongside of the persistence of such prissy standards there has emerged, during the past century, a new set of interests in what living people do say.

The emergence of this new approach can be dated by changes in dictionary making. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the function of the dictionary was to set correct usage. It aimed to purify the language. The great dictionaries were often the products of official academies of the top literati who became the arbiters of usage. In Italy, the Accademia della Crusca issued its Vocabolario in 1612, which long was the standard of the language. In France, the Académie Française published the first edition of its dictionary in 1694. In England, where no academy existed, the original intent of Johnson’s Dictionary was the same, though the product was quite different. Thus these early dictionaries all had a common origin in a desire to set good usage.

The nineteenth century saw a change. In 1854, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published their dictionary of the German language which sought to register language as it was, not to make it is it ought to be. The new approach was well expressed by Dean Trench three years later in a paper on “Some Deficiencies in Existing English Dictionaries.” He said, “A dictionary is an inventory of the language.… It is no task of the maker of it to select the good words.… He is an historian,… not a critic.”

In the century since then great progress has been made in the empirical study of language. The latest dictionary, the Thorndike-Barnhart, is based upon the now familiar technique of word counts, The pocket edition contains the 30,000 most frequently used words as established in counts of over ...