In light of the SSRC’s Media & Democracy program’s ongoing work, Items revisits this 1975 piece by Thomas E. Patterson and Ronald P. Abeles. As part of the Council’s Committee on Mass Communication and Political Behavior, the authors present the impetus behind this committee’s formation as well as potential research directions to explore, including how the media agenda is set, what and who influences it, and how the media impacts public opinion throughout an election cycle. Readers might want to compare their understanding of the present moment to how scholars imagined the fraught, complex relationship between media and politics over 40 years ago when, as the authors argue, already “mass media” has “supplanted political parties as the major intermediary between office seekers and the electorate.”

We continue republishing Items archival essays from a 1999 special issue on the 2000 census with this contribution on political partisanship’s new effects on enumeration. Kenneth Prewitt, then director of the US Census Bureau, warns in this piece against the politicization of methodology and sampling techniques as happened in the run-up to the 2000 census. Though the census has always been political, Prewitt argued that politicians’ shift from politicizing the results to the methodology potentially undermines science, the public’s trust in the census, and the quality of its findings, creating a ripple effect across all national statistics.

We continue republishing Items archival essays from a 1999 special issue on the 2000 census with this contribution on how technical questions of measurement are intertwined with political interests. Margo Anderson and Stephen Fienberg analyze how, given the stakes of reapportionment that census results determine, the statistical methods to compensate for census undercounts are politicized. Especially opposed by the Republican Party in the run-up to the 2000 census were attempts to use sampling techniques to more accurately count poor and minority populations.

Ahead of the 2000 census, Reynolds Farley, in this 1999 piece from the Items archive, delves into the importance of the decennial census for the United States. Highlighting contemporary shifts in the social and economic status of Americans, he stresses the role of the census in understanding these changes at a deeper level, both for policymakers and social scientists, with the economic, racial and ethnic, geographic, and family data it provides. Readers will observe a range of issues relevant to current debates regarding the 2020 census.