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The Hoover Elite Studies Revisited

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Heinz Eulau
Heinz Eulau*
Affiliation:
Stanford University
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Extract

Project RADIR (“Revolution and the Development of International Relations”), conducted at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution in the years following the Second World War, was probably the first large-scale, quantitatively-based empirical research enterprise in contemporary political science. Inspired Dy the theories of Harold D. Lasswell about world revolutionary developments in the modern era, the project was in some respects the successor to work done in wartime Washington at the Library of Congress by Lasswell’s Experimental Division for the Study of Wartime Communications, and by the Organizations and Propaganda Analysis Section that Lasswell had helped to set up in the Special War Policies Unit of the Department of Justice. When published in the early fifties, the Hoover Studies, as they came to be called, were noted not only for their substantive findings but also for their theoretical suggestiveness and their methodological boldness of overall design. Most pre-war empirical, quantitative work in political science had been hyperfactual, but the Hoover Studies represented a genuine break with that tradition. Some early reviewers, if not ignorant of quantitative analysis, had trouble with the project’s theoretical formulations, and others were methodologically innocent.^ The methodological novelty of the Hoover Studies consisted in the demonstration that quantitative data could be generated out of the verbal contents found in newspapers and conventional biographies. Although some political scientists had made use of aggregate data reported in the Census, government budgets, legislative roll-calls and electoral statistics, the notion that one can “create” one’s own massive body of data was still relatively new at mid-century. Public opinion polls had come into existence only in the middle thirties and had yet to be exploited fully for scientific purposes. It was in this research context that the Hoover Studies were published.

Type
Retrospective Review
Information
Social Science History , Volume 1 , Issue 3 , Spring 1977 , pp. 392 - 400
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1977 

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References

Notes

1 Little of the research done by the Lasswell group in wartime Washington has been reported. Products of the “World Attention Survey,” involving content analyses of the international press and reports of technical problems of quantification, were brought together in 1949 in Harold D. Lasswell, Nathan Leites and Associates, Language of Politics: Studies in Quantitative Semantics (reissued in 1965 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press). The studies conducted at the Justice Department were “confidential.” I am not aware of any study conducted by OPAS reported in the scientific literature. For a memoir of the Lasswell groups in Washington, see Eulau, Heinz, “The Behavioral Movement in Political Science: A Personal Document,” Social Research, XXXV (March 1968), 8–12.Google Scholar

2 The best description of pre-war political science is still found in Easton, David, The Political System: An Inquiry into the State of Political Science (New York, 1953), 64–89.Google Scholar

3 See, for instance, the review by Ross, Ralph Gilbert, “Elites and the Methodology of Politics,” Public Opinion Quarterly, XVI (Spring 1952), 27–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I am singling out this review because it was published in a presumably avant-guard social science journal. One of the rare reviewers who understood the Hoover Studies and their vision was Janowitz, Morris, “The Systematic Analysis of Political Biography,” World Politics, VI (April 1954), 405–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This review retains its freshness.

4 There were really only two major studies before 1950 that made use of interviews as a source of quantitative data. One was the pioneering study by Lazarsfeld, Paul F., Berelson, Bernard, and Gaudet, Hazel, The People’s Choice (New York, 1944)Google Scholar. The other was Key, V.O. Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York, 1949)Google Scholar, a monumental study based on both aggregate data and interviews with politicians, the latter being a breakthrough in its own right. See the article by Key’s collaborator Alexander Heard, “Interviewing Southern Politicians,” American Political Science Review, XLIV (December 1950), 886-96. This is not to say that Key had no precursors using quantitative data in the study of politics. A. Lawrence Lowell had used legislative roll-calls; Arthur N. Holcombe and Stuart A. Rice had used aggregate election statistics; and Harold F. Gosnell had used interviews with citizens and even experimental designs. But their data bases had been limited.

5 All the studies were published by the Stanford University Press. The Symbol Series included: Harold D. Lasswell, Daniel Lerner, and Ithiel de Sola Pool, The Comparative Study of Symbols: An Introduction (1952); Ithiel Pool, The “Prestige Papers” (1952); Ithiel de Sola Pool, Symbols of Internationalism (1951). The four studies are now available in a single volume, Sola Pool, Ithiel de et al., The Prestige Press: A Comparative Study of Political Symbols (Cambridge, Mass., 1970).Google Scholar

6 Only two “institutional” studies seem to have been published, though others were projected. See Alexander Vucinich, Soviet Economic Institutions: The Social Structure of Production Units (1952); and Saul K. Padover, French Institutions: Values and Politics (1954).

7 Lasswell, Harold D., World Politics and Personal Insecurity (New York, 1935), 3–4.Google Scholar

8 Lasswell, Harold D., Lerner, Daniel, and Rothwell, C. Easton, The Comparative Study of Elites: An Introduction and Bibliography (1952), 22Google Scholar. The Hoover Elite Studies included: Schueller, George K., The Politbureau (1951)Google Scholar; Lerner, Daniel, The Nazi Elite (1951)Google Scholar; North, Robert C., Kuomintang and Chinese Communist Elites (1952)Google Scholar; and Knight, Maxwell E., The German Executive: 1890-1933 (1952)Google Scholar. Other evidently projected volumes were never published. Some of the studies, along with some previously unpublished essays, have been reissued; see Lasswell, Harold D. and Lerner, Daniel, eds., World Revolutionary Elites: Studies in Coercive Ideological Movements (Cambridge, Mass., 1965).Google Scholar

9 Heinberg, John G., “The Personnel of French Cabinets, 1871-1930,” American Political Science Review, XXV (May 1931), 389–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “The Personnel Structure of French Cabinets,” American Political Science Review, XXXIII (April 1939), 267-79.

10 Laski, Harold J., “The Personnel of the English Cabinet, 1801-1924,” American Political Science Review, XXII (February 1928), 12–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Ibid., 12.

12 See Parry, Geraint, Political Elites (London, 1969)Google Scholar; Prewitt, Kenneth and Stone, Alan, The Ruling Elites: Elite Theory, Power, and American Democracy (New York, 1973).Google Scholar

13 Eulau, Heinz, “Elite Analysis and Democratic Theory: The Contribution of Harold D. Lasswell,” in Eulau, H. and Czudnowski, M.M., eds., Elite Recruitment in Democratic Polities: Comparative Studies Across Nations (Beverly Hills, Cal., 1976), 7–28.Google Scholar

14 Notably in two books of the mid-thirties, World Politics and Personal Insecurity (New York, 1935), and Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (New York, 1936).

15 Lynd, Robert S., Knowledge for What? The Place of Social Science in American Culture (Princeton, 1939).Google Scholar

16 Lasswell, Harold D., “The Policy Orientation,” in Lerner, Daniel and Lasswell, Harold D., eds., The Policy Sciences (Stanford, Cal., 1951), 3–15Google Scholar, at 15. I am quoting from this source because the volume was thought of as the “methodological” capstone of project RADIR. For an earlier formulation (1942), see “The Developing Science of Democracy,” reprinted in Harold D. Lasswell, The Analysis of Political Behavior (New York, 1948), 1-12.

17 I am dealing with this aspect of Lasswell’s work in “Policy Pragmatics and Political Science: The Interventionist Synthesis,” American Journal of Political Science, XXI (May, 1977). See also the brilliant exegesis of Lasswell’s entire corpus of writings by Dwaine Marvick, “Contexts, Problems and Methods: Harold Lasswell on Political Sociology,” an Introduction to a forthcoming collection of Lasswell’s writings to be published by University of Chicago Press.

18 See Lasswell and Lerner, World Revolutionary Elites.

19 This and the following quotations are from ibid., v.

20 Private communication, November 13, 1976.

21 Lerner, Nazi Elite, 98.

22 One may note Lasswell’s self-conscious effort in this regard in his collaboration with the philosopher Abraham Kaplan in a dictionary-like compendium of interdependent definitions and hypotheses initiated in 1941 at the Library of Congress but not published until ten years later. See Lasswell, Harold D. and Kaplan, Abraham, Power and Society: A Framework for Political Inquiry (New Haven, 1950).Google Scholar

23 See Lasswell, Harold D., “Agenda for the Study of Political Elites,” in Marvick, Dwaine, ed., Political Decision-makers (New York, 1961), 263–87Google Scholar; Lasswell, Harold D., “Political Systems, Styles, and Personality,” in Edinger, Lewis J., ed., Political Leadership in Industrialized Societies: Studies in Comparative Analysis (New York, 1967), 316–47Google Scholar; and Harold D. Lasswell, “Introduction: The Study of Political Elites,” in Lasswell and Lerner, World Revolutionary Elites, 3-28.

24 Private communication, November 22, 1976.

25 Rustow, Dankwart A., “The Study of Elites: Who’s Who, When, and How,” World Politics, XVIII (July 1966), 691.Google Scholar

26 See “H.D. Lasswell’s Developmental Analysis,” and “The Maddening Methods of Harold D. Lasswell,” in Heinz Eulau, Micro-Macro Political Analysis: Accents of Inquiry (Chicago, 1969), 105-37.