How opinion polls served the colonial project, and why it matters
Kiran Phull
Recent efforts to uproot and confront the long shadow of colonialism have explored the sources of disparity in our urban and data infrastructures, in our practices of remembering, our global economic, health and development systems, and more. Where colonial legacies are perhaps less obvious is in the methods we use to derive knowledge, collect information, and generate social facts. Radical work has been done toward decolonizing western research methodologies and addressing the complicities of the researcher within the social sciences. But with notable exceptions, there is less focus on the colonial entanglements of everyday research and data collection.
My research explores the thorny history of the scientific study of public opinion. I examine the global history of political opinion polls and social surveys, tracing how western opinion science operated in coordination with colonial power as a means of identifying, classifying, and governing racial subjects.
There is a dearth of information on the history of opinion research outside the United States, particularly relating to the Global South. As such, my research shows how western researchers configured regions like the Middle East as testing grounds for developing a science of opinion research. More broadly, I investigate the ways that western scientific practices have not only shaped how we understand global public opinion today, but how public opinion monitoring has emerged as a form of global security governance.
Western scientific imperialism in polls of the past
I investigate the ethos of ‘scientific imperialism’ that accompanied efforts to understand, occupy, and tame public opinion in and on the Middle East from the early twentieth century. This involves paying close attention to research design and the underlying assumptions that influenced generations of social scientists and pollsters. Three characteristics of this imperialist ethos persist in current research practices.
First, there is a logic to scientific opinion research that envisions a value-free, objective way of knowing the world. Here, the social world is viewed as an objective space where reality can be codified and interpreted at a distance.
An example of this is the King-Crane Commission of 1919, which aimed to form political solutions for governing the Middle East following the demise of Ottoman rule. To ensure the absence of personal bias, Commission researchers were required to have no prior experience or knowledge of the region and no interests in the political struggles of Arab nationalism. This allowed for ‘carte blanche’ experts to conduct reductive and systematic surveys of local opinion without a duty of care to those they surveyed. In other words, objectivity was equated with racialized ignorance. At publication the King-Crane report was heralded as a triumph of American social science. Yet, at its core, there was no clear intention to understand the diversity of opinions surveyed in context, let alone to support Arab aspirations for self-determination.
Second, public opinion research produces hierarchies of social difference. In the setting of the Cold War, for instance, American social science developed alongside a prolonged operation to contain communism and refashion postcolonial societies in the image of American progress. Modernization theories had a profound impact on the study of public opinion, which came to be seen as a key driver of social development. Within the American military-academic-industrial complex, researchers defined Middle Eastern societies on the grounds of their ‘modern-ness’, with one influential study finding that progress favoured societies that answered polled questions in the most ‘satisfactory’ way. The result was to project a racialized primitiveness on those who answered ‘don’t know’ or gave unsolicited opinions, and thus to structure global public opinion into hierarchies of racial difference.
Third, scientific polls can be designed to polarize opinion and manufacture security dilemmas. We see this, for instance, in the growing dichotomization of Israel and Palestine in international survey design after 1947 with a trend toward asking respondents to choose a side in the conflict (a typical example is a 1967 Harris poll that asked, ‘Who do you think has more right on their side — the Arabs or Israel?’). In countless international polls recorded by American organizations like Gallup and the Office of Public Opinion Research, we find the complex historical trajectories of Jewish and Palestinian statehood and statelessness reduced to either/or conditional statements.
The architecting of international opinion on the question of Palestine in the twentieth century was partly a matter of deliberate methodological design, which has ultimately bolstered American strategic interests in the region. Unpacking this design exposes the tactical interests and racialized politics of global opinion research.
Why the histories of our polling methods matter
These practices cannot be relegated to the past or treated as cases of bad scientific inquiry. We must pay close attention to the ways scientific practices of objectivity, social ordering, and polarization are still embedded in global opinion research today. The contribution of Middle Eastern opinion data to the framing of US strategy in the War on Terror is a more recent example of practices that tie together social science research with neoliberal governance and colonial histories.
Today, debates about the veracity of polling in the wake of high-profile predictive blunders rage on. From the US election forecasting and Brexit referendum misfires to states that tamper and manufacture domestic opinion, public trust in the democratic potential of opinion polling is faltering. Yet opinion polls and surveys remain a dominant fixture of contemporary political life and a staple of social scientific research. While considerable attention is being directed toward improving methods, rethinking statistical uncertainty, and adapting to life in a digital public sphere, the rehabilitation of these methods can conceal discriminatory modes of thinking already entrenched in our research practices.
By failing to acknowledge the tenuous entanglements between colonial governance and opinion research, the objectification and ordering of people and their political desires on the basis of difference becomes the status quo. Challenging this means confronting the history and hegemony of western science in our globalized practices of social scientific research.
Dr Kiran Phull is a Lecturer in International Relations at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London.
New Voices in Global Security is a collaborative blog series between the School of Security Studies, King’s College London, and International Affairs. Drawing on cutting edge research, the blog series highlights diverse empirical, methodological and theoretical approaches to understanding global security and engages with questions of equality, diversity and inclusion within the discipline. Contributions are based on the New Voices event series — organized and chaired by Dr Amanda Chisholm, School Equality, Diversity and Inclusion lead — which promotes the research of PhD students and Early Career Researchers (ECRs) working both within and beyond the School of Security Studies.
All views expressed are individual not institutional.
