The Gallup poll, democracy, and the vox populi: Ideologies of interviewing and the communicability of modern life

Charles L Briggs

doi:10.1515/TEXT.2007.031

Article

The Gallup poll, democracy, and the vox populi: Ideologies of interviewing and the communicability of modern life

Charles L Briggs
Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include medicine and public health, violence, interviewing, the news media, race and racism, and connections between ideologies of communication, modernity, liberalism, science, and the political. Recent books include Stories in the Time of Cholera: Racial Profiling during a Medical Nightmare (2003, with Clara Mantini-Briggs) and Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality (2003, with Richard Bauman).

Published/Copyright: October 19, 2007

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From the journal Text & Talk Volume 27 Issue 5-6

Abstract

One of Aaron Cicourel's most critical contributions to social science lies in his pioneering work on gaps between the complex pragmatics of research interviews and the ways that they are conceptualized by practitioners. This article argues for systematic attention to ideological constructions of interviewing, taking as its focus George Gallup's ‘civic model’ of polls and his efforts to transform them into a crucial foundation for democratic governance in the United States and beyond. Countering deep skepticism about polling among social scientists, politicians, and journalists in the 1930s and 1940s, Gallup fused ideologies of science, quantification, and democracy with a construction of the production, circulation, and reception of discourse about ‘public opinion’. This communicable cartography (or ideological map) shapes how the current Gallup ‘Editor-in-Chief ’ positions polling as the sine qua non for constructing subjects and states in a neoliberal age. An analysis of a Gallup poll suggests that this communicable cartography is inscribed in multiple ways in each presentation of polling data, thrusting readers into a textual universe that claims to know the ‘real vox populi’ and how it has connected US citizens and politicians for six decades.

Keywords: communicability; language ideology; interview; polling; democracy

*Address for correspondence: Department of Anthropology, 232 Kroeber Hall, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-3710, USA

About the author

Charles L Briggs

Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include medicine and public health, violence, interviewing, the news media, race and racism, and connections between ideologies of communication, modernity, liberalism, science, and the political. Recent books include Stories in the Time of Cholera: Racial Profiling during a Medical Nightmare (2003, with Clara Mantini-Briggs) and Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality (2003, with Richard Bauman).

Published Online: 2007-10-19

Published in Print: 2007-10-19

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Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/TEXT.2007.031

Keywords for this article

communicability; language ideology; interview; polling; democracy