George Gallup and the rhetoric of scientific democracy

Abstract

Throughout his career, George Gallup, the “father” of modern polling, crusaded tirelessly to establish polling's scientific and cultural legitimacy. In public speeches, several books, and more than a hundred articles in journals and popular magazines, Gallup mythologized polling's history of “progress,” deflected doubts about the polls' accuracy and technical procedures with a rhetoric of scientific mystification, and celebrated the collective wisdom of “the people.” Gallup's “rhetoric of scientific democracy” sustained polling's cultural legitimacy, yet it also diverted attention from its most perplexing sources of error and stifled debate over its deleterious effects on the democratic process.