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The Effect of Television upon Voting Behavior in Iowa in the 1952 Presidential Election*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Herbert A. Simon  and
Frederick Stern
Herbert A. Simon
Affiliation:
Carnegie Institute of Technology
Frederick Stern
Affiliation:
Carnegie Institute of Technology
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Extract

The presidential election of 1952 offered a unique opportunity for the study of the effect of television upon voting behavior. By happy accident—the FCC freeze on the construction of new television stations—it was possible to find areas of the United States where there were counties within television reception range and also counties otherwise similar to these with respect to their past voting behavior, but outside the reception area. In these areas the presence or absence of television can be regarded, with reasonable safety, as a genuine independent variable; and if television influenced voting behavior, there is some hope of detecting its effects.

The uniqueness of the situation and its utility for testing hypotheses about the effects of television deserve some comment. Ordinarily, one is confronted in ecological studies with an insurmountable confusion of cause and effect. For example, had there not been an “artificial” restriction on the extension of the television network in 1952, we would not be safe in regarding a county without television as comparable with a county having television. For in that case, absence of television would imply remoteness from centers of population of any size, and we could not assume that influences upon voting behavior in such remote counties would be the same as in counties closer to population centers.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 49 , Issue 2 , June 1955 , pp. 470 - 477
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1955

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References

1 In one of the few articles published on the relation of individual voting and television viewing behavior, “Television and the Election,” Scientific American, Vol. 188, pp. 46–48 (May, 1953)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Campbell, Gurin, and Miller state that they have no clear-cut evidence concerning how television affected the voting. Their findings, coming from a survey of 1,714 people representative of the citizens of voting age throughout the country, pertain mainly to a comparison of television with newspapers, radios, and magazines as a source of information in the campaign.

2 A survey by CBS Television Research (figures projected to May 1, 1953), as published in the Telecasting Yearbook-Marketbook for 1953–54. The data are applicable to a period approximately one year following the time with which we are concerned. However, it is not unreasonable to assume that over the course of this year the relative television densities remained about constant. Hence for our purposes the May 1, 1953 data are fairly acceptable.

3 The Ames television station was an educational station, and it may be supposed that it did not play the same role in the campaign as the other stations. However, since it carried sixteen television broadcasts for each of the major parties, this objection can hardly be sustained.

4 LTD counties are those in which less than 20 per cent of the families owned a television set.

5 An alternative hypothesis, suggested to us by James G. March, is that television served as a substitute for, rather than an addition to, the other mass media in areas where it was available. The evidence is, of course, as consistent with this hypothesis as with the one proposed here. Some data supporting Mr. March's hypothesis are available in the Michigan poll.