Observing the Sovereign: Opinion Polls and the Restructuring of the Body Politic in West Germany, 1945–1990

Abstract

It is hard to overestimate the impact of opinion polling on the political system in West Germany since 1945. Widespread measuring of political attitudes and perceptions with the statistical techniques of the random or quota-sample, pioneered by George Gallup in the USA since the 1930s, fundamentally changed the way in which political decisions were taken, how party allegiances were shaped and organized, and how different policies were designed and implemented. In addition, the use of polling techniques had a massive bearing on what is called public opinion or the public sphere, that is, a field that is constituted by observations of the political process, and by observations of these observations. When Gerhard Schmidtchen, an employee of the Institut für Demoskopie in Allensbach, published one of the first book-length reflections ‘on the impact of polling on politics’ in the Federal Republic in 1959, he stressed precisely this point. The political system had ‘to face the fact’, Schmidtchen argued, ‘that an archaic age would come to an end, during which people believed that social insights … would emerge automatically’. Polling, already ‘an informal institution in the large democratic states’, would replace human observation with a sophisticated ‘technical apparatus’ and thus create a crucial ‘macro effect’ on any future political history.¹