Are Polls Ruining Democracy?
Are Polls Ruining Democracy?
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/16/politics-and-the-new-machine “#Datascience is the child of a rocky marriage between the academy & Silicon Valley”
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“If public-opinion polling is the child of a strained marriage between the press and the academy, data science is the child of a rocky marriage between the academy and Silicon Valley. The term “data science” was coined in 1960, one year after the Democratic National Committee hired Simulmatics Corporation, a company founded by Ithiel de Sola Pool, a political scientist from M.I.T., to provide strategic analysis in advance of the upcoming Presidential election. Pool and his team collected punch cards from pollsters who had archived more than sixty polls from the elections of 1952, 1954, 1956, 1958, and 1960, representing more than a hundred thousand interviews, and fed them into a UNIVAC. They then sorted voters into four hundred and eighty possible types (for example, “Eastern, metropolitan,
lower-income, white, Catholic, female Democrat”) and sorted issues into fifty-two clusters (for example, foreign aid). Simulmatics’ first task, completed just before the Democratic National Convention, was a study of “the Negro vote in the North.” Its report, which is thought to have influenced the civil-rights paragraphs added to the Party’s platform, concluded that between 1954 and 1956 “a small but
significant shift to the Republicans occurred among Northern Negroes, which cost the Democrats about 1 per cent of the total votes in 8 key states.” After the nominating convention, the D.N.C. commissioned Simulmatics to prepare three more reports, including one that involved running simulations about different ways in which Kennedy might discuss his Catholicism.”
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