From Our Archives

In this Items archive piece from 1964, Sidney Verba reports on a conference organized by the SSRC’s Committee on Comparative Politics that addressed how survey research methods can help understand political change in the developing world—what was then referred to as “political modernization.” The conference considered the use of survey research in comparative studies, how to expand survey research by focusing on subgroups within nation states, and potential methodological and organizational problems.

In an effort to better understand the application of digital computers in the social sciences, particularly psychology, the SSRC’s Committee on the Simulation of Cognitive Processes, working alongside the RAND Corporation, convened a summer training institute to gauge this new technology’s application by a select group of social scientists. Written by the institute’s codirectors, Herbert A. Simon and Allen Newell, this 1958 archive report details the activities, particularly the programming of cognitive simulations, of the three-week event, and concludes with steps to further disseminate simulation techniques and expand the field.

The end of World War II and the start of the Cold War placed the United States in a new geopolitical and military position in the world. To better understand the policy implications of this new role’s effect on the public, the SSRC convened the Committee on Civil-Military Relations Research in 1952. Here, Gordon A. Craig and Bryce Wood describe the committee’s findings as of 1954, emphasizing the lack of history on US military policy and introducing a new grants program to expand historical and social science research on the topic.

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.