Angus Campbell

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Title page of Campbell's book "The American Voter"
Title page of the major work by Angus Campbell, first published in 1960

Albert Angus Campbell (born  August 10, 1910 in Leiters Ford , Indiana , †  December 15, 1980 in Ann Arbor , Michigan ) was an American social psychologist who worked from 1946 until his death at the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan and with his Work made fundamental contributions to election research .

Together with other authors, he designed a socio-psychological model to explain the voting behavior of voters in political elections , which is considered one of the three main theoretical currents of electoral research. According to this approach, also known as the Ann Arbor model , the assessment of the candidates, the evaluation of the currently relevant political issues and party identification are seen as the essential factors in individual voting decisions , with weighting depending on the election situation . His major work, published in 1960 under the title The American Voter , is accordingly a political science milestone with far-reaching influence on other authors.

In addition, Angus Campbell was also engaged in studying the relationships between the various ethnic groups in the United States and researching the perception of quality of life and satisfaction . He is considered a pioneer of applied opinion research and was one of the most influential scientists in the field of political psychology in the second half of the 20th century. For his scientific achievements he was honored with the Distinguished Scientific Achievement Award of the American Psychological Association and in 1980 he was accepted into the National Academy of Sciences .

Life

Training and early work

Angus Campbell was born in 1910 as the fifth of six children of Albert Alexis Campbell and Orpha Brumbaugh in Leiters Ford in the US state of Indiana and grew up in Portland from the age of two . His father, the son of a farmer from a strictly Presbyterian background, had studied Latin and Greek at the University of Michigan and had worked as a teacher and later in senior positions in school administrations in Miami County, Indiana and Portland. Angus Campbell graduated from the University of Oregon with a degree in psychology and received his BA in 1931 and his MA one year later . He then moved to Stanford University , where he attended courses from Kurt Lewin , among other things . Lewin, with whom he was on friendly terms until his death, exerted a great influence on the professional views of Angus Campbell. In 1936 he received his doctorate under Ernest Hilgard , who became a model for Angus Campbell due to his research and teaching methodology, with a thesis on conditioning the blink of an eye .

In the same year he took a position as a lecturer in psychology at Northwestern University , where he was appointed assistant professor in 1940 . After he had originally planned to further expand his orientation towards experimental psychology based on his doctoral thesis, social psychology became the focus of his work due to the teaching obligations at Northwestern University . He came into contact with the anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits , on whose advice he went to Cambridge University in Great Britain on a scholarship from the Social Science Research Council in 1939 to do further training as a postdoctoral fellow in social anthropology . After only six months, however, due to the beginning of the Second World War , he returned prematurely to the USA. In the following years he devoted himself to a field study on the culture and character of the inhabitants of Saint Thomas in the US Virgin Islands . During his stay at Saint Thomas, in June 1940, he married his wife, whom he had met as a psychology student at Northwestern University. The marriage resulted in two daughters and a son.

Worked at the University of Michigan

1942 Angus Campbell moved to the of Rensis Likert built Division of Program Surveys , a division of the Ministry of Agriculture of the United States whose job was to investigate due to the war social and economic problems in the United States. From 1942 to 1944 he acted as head of studies, from 1944 to 1945 as research director and from 1945 to 1946 as deputy head of the department. During this time he dealt with the methodology of surveys , in particular with their planning, the underlying interview techniques and the design of questionnaires . After the end of the Second World War, the department moved in 1946 under the name Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan . After Kurt Lewin died in 1948, his research group was moved from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to the University of Michigan, where it was established as the Research Center for Group Dynamics . Both research centers were then merged into the Institute for Social Research , with Rensis Likert as its director, while Angus Campbell became deputy director and took over the management of the Survey Research Center .

After Likert's retirement in 1970, he succeeded him as director of the institute. He gave up this position six years later in order to be able to concentrate on research activities again as program director of the Survey Research Center . Angus Campbell's teaching duties at the University of Michigan included lectures in the departments of psychology and sociology from 1964 onwards, as well as seminars in legal sociology at the law school. In addition to his academic work, he acted as a consultant to the Ford Foundation on several occasions between 1959 and 1961 . In addition, he worked in committees of the National Academy of Sciences , of the United States Department of Labor belonging to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and various other government agencies as well as trade associations such as the American Psychological Association and scientific organizations such as the National Research Council . His wife was the director of the Center for Continuing Education at the University of Michigan. He died in Ann Arbor in 1980 at the age of 70 as a result of a heart attack . His estate is held in the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan.

Act

The Ann Arbor Model of Voter Behavior

Campbell's causality funnel model to illustrate the factors that lead to voting according to the Ann Arbor model of voter behavior

The focus of the research activities of Angus Campbell was the study of voter behavior in political elections , on which he published his first monograph in 1952 under the title The People Elect a President . His best-known and most influential work is the book The American Voter , first published eight years later , based on studies of nationwide data from the elections of 1952 and 1956 as well as smaller samples from the elections of 1948, 1954 and 1958. The aim of the study, published jointly with his colleagues Philip E. Converse , Warren E. Miller and Donald E. Stokes , was to analyze the reasons for individual voter behavior instead of looking at the entire electorate.

In this work, Angus Campbell further developed a model designed in 1954 in The Voter Decides , according to which the voting decision is based primarily on three influencing factors: the assessment of the candidates, the assessment of the currently relevant political issues and the so-called party identification . In The American Voter , he changed this explanatory approach, known as the Ann Arbor model , to the effect that, on the one hand, party identification is considered a long-term stable and central variable. On the other hand, these three factors were no longer taken for granted, but instead traced back to the voter's historical experience and social environment. In addition, he now considered other influencing factors such as the economic situation and thus reacted to the criticism that his approach would almost completely ignore the social context in the voting decision.

To illustrate his theory, Angus Campbell used the term “ funnel of causality” in his work , which describes the interaction of all relevant aspects that ultimately lead to the voting decision. The comparison with a funnel illustrates the increase in complexity when considering possible influences, the further the investigation shifts from the three postulated main social-psychological variables to factors in the voter's individual past. From the studies on which the work The American Voter is based, Angus Campbell and his colleagues concluded, among other things, that for two thirds to three quarters of all voters their voting decision is already certain before the start of the election campaign . In contrast, around ten to 20 percent decide during the election campaign, and only around one in ten voters make a decision in the last two weeks before the election.

Classification of political elections

Building on the Ann Arbor model, Angus Campbell also proposed a classification for American presidential elections in The American Voter . According to this approach, most of these elections, such as the Republican victories in the 1920s and the 1948 election , are so-called maintaining elections . Their outcome would primarily be shaped by long-term party ties, which would preserve the existing balance of power. In contrast, he exhibited for an election, which he described as deviating elections called (different options). The result of such an election, as in the elections of 1916 and 1952 , is particularly influenced by the personalities of the candidates or other extraordinary circumstances and thus temporarily deviates from longer-term party-political voter preferences. As a third type, on the other hand, he defined so-called realigning elections (reorientation elections ) such as the elections of 1896 and 1932 . According to his theory, the result would be a longer-term change in voter orientation and political conditions.

In 1966, Angus Campbell, together with other authors, published Elections and the Political Order , another work on election research, which included analyzes of individual voting behavior in the USA and comparative studies based on data from France and Norway . This work, which was a collection of articles previously published elsewhere, represented a consistent preparation and further development of the model previously designed in The American Voter . In particular, the classification of elections was expanded to include a fourth type, the reinstating elections (restorative elections) and are characterized by a return to pre-existing political conditions. Angus Campbell himself made a contribution to this book that he had published in 1960 in the journal Public Opinion Quarterly . In this he drafted an explanation for two regularly occurring scenarios in elections in the USA. On the one hand, this concerned the phenomenon that after a presidential election the president's party loses seats in the immediately following congressional elections , and on the other hand, the observation that an increase in voter turnout in presidential elections only leads to a significant gain in votes for one of the two parties.

As a cause he postulated an effect he called " surge and decline ", with which he described the change between high stimulus elections (elections with a high incentive), which he included the presidential elections, and low stimulus elections (elections with little incentive) , which, in his opinion, included most of the post-presidential congressional elections. In the case of high stimulus elections with a high turnout, the main focus of the voting decision would be the evaluation of the candidates and the current issues over party identification. In such an election, both so-called peripheral voters with less interest in the election and independent voters without a firm party identification would mainly orient themselves towards factors that have a short-term effect. In contrast, in the case of low stimulus elections , long-term file identification is particularly crucial for the voting decision. In addition to the absence of peripheral voters and thus lower voter turnout, the short-term factors that were decisive for the preceding high stimulus election usually also do not have any effect . In addition, according to Angus Campbell's view, voters who deviated from their party affiliation in a high stimulus election due to the current circumstances would vote again in a low stimulus election according to their long-term party identification.

Further research interests

In addition to electoral research, Angus Campbell also explored the relationships between different ethnic groups in the United States and, in later years of his life, analyzed perceptions of quality of life and satisfaction . He published several works in both areas, including the monograph White Attitudes Toward Black People in 1971 and The Quality of American Life: Perceptions, Evaluations, and Satisfaction five years later . His last work, which was based on surveys on marriage and family life , the work situation , neighborhood relationships, standard of living , health and a number of other topics, appeared in 1980 under the title The Sense of Well-Being in America: Recent Patterns and trend . One of his conclusions from this research was that in the US, an increasing number of people were attaching increasing importance to non-economic factors in their lives. A new edition of The Quality of American Life as well as a work on the quality of life of the elderly that had been started remained unfinished due to his death.

reception

Science-historical context

Angus Campbell's methodological and conceptual approach to electoral research represented a fundamental further development of the methodology of the Columbia School's school of thought founded by Paul Felix Lazarsfeld . According to this microsociological model, which Lazarsfeld had postulated on the basis of surveys carried out in 1940 in Erie County, Ohio , the voting behavior of a voter is mainly influenced by the social groups to which he belongs and whose political norms of behavior shape his voting decision. According to Lazarsfeld, the socio-economic status , religious affiliation and the size of the place of residence are the decisive features that he summarized in an “index of political predisposition”. His research, which he published in The People's Choice in 1944 , was subject to limitations that resulted from focusing on a specific local population in a single election year. Lazarsfeld was subsequently blamed for the widespread failure of the election prognoses in the US presidential election in 1948 , as the polling institutes involved, based on his theory, had dispensed with polls in the final phase of the election campaign and thus did not predict the decisive change in mood in favor of incumbent Harry S. Truman . In a 1968 reprint of The People's Choice , Lazarsfeld recognized the importance of party identification postulated by Angus Campbell and his colleagues, but also stressed the influence of the Columbia School on the methodology they used.

At about the same time as Angus Campbell's work, Anthony Downs introduced the rational choice approach into electoral research in his 1957 work An Economic Theory of Democracy, which assumes a rational decision by the voter after weighing up costs and benefits in favor of his own interests. Based on this model, Angus Campbell's theory was later criticized, among other things, for the lack of a rule that could answer the question of which of the three main variables he examined was decisive in the event of a conflict. Angus Campbell and his colleagues did not come up with a universal solution to this problem. Angus Campbell's view that party identification is stable in the long term was also questioned on the basis of the rational choice approach. Another point of criticism was that his approach was too shaped by the specifics of the United States' political system, such as the two-party system that existed there. Angus Campbell himself was of the opinion that his model could not be transferred to other political systems. Later, however, it became apparent that the socio-psychological core of his considerations can be supplemented by country-specific economic, cultural and social factors and is then valid for a large number of other countries. The authors of The Changing American Voter took the position that the conclusions of Angus Campbell and his colleagues only apply specifically to the elections on which the analyzed data are based and are therefore not generally applicable to elections in the USA.

Life's work

Through his work, Angus Campbell made a significant contribution to integrating the investigation of psychological questions into comparative political science . He also made important methodological contributions to opinion polls, particularly in the field of conducting and evaluating surveys, and was jointly responsible for the development of the Institute of Social Research at the University of Michigan into one of the world's leading institutions in the field of social science research. With his work on his socio-psychological explanatory model of voter behavior, he established one of the three main theoretical currents of electoral research alongside Lazarsfeld's microsociological theory and Downs' rational choice approach. By using voter surveys, which were of central importance to the research of Angus Campbell, instead of analyzing election statistics, he succeeded in removing previously existing restrictions on electoral research and shifting its focus to the micro level of individual motives and decisions. This enabled more detailed and more reliable election analyzes than the deduction of voter behavior from statistical studies of election data. The Center for Political Studies within the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan later emerged from his research on voting behavior .

Angus Campbell's book The American Voter is considered a conceptual and methodological breakthrough in the study of American politics and a key work in political science due to its far-reaching significance . His long-lasting influence on electoral research is reflected in a number of publications by other authors with similar titles. These include, for example, The Changing American Voter (1976), The Unchanging American Voter (1989), The Disappearing American Voter (1992), The New American Voter (1996) and The American Voter Revisited (2008). Along with Elections and the Political Order , published four years later , The American Voter formed the basis for the Michigan School's line of thought in electoral research. The methodology of the studies on American presidential and congressional elections, regularly carried out by the Survey Research Center up to the present as part of the American National Election Studies , has become a model for studies on the analysis of political elections worldwide. In the 1960s and 1970s in particular, the Ann Arbor Summer School , in which Angus Campbell and his colleagues taught the theoretical foundations of their model and the data collection and analysis methodology based on it, developed into the “Mecca of political behavior research” for election researchers from others Countries.

Awards

Angus Campbell received the Distinguished Achievement Award of the American Association for Public Opinion Research in 1962 , the Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award of the University of Michigan in 1969 , the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association in 1974, and the Lazarsfeld Award of the Council for Applied Social in 1977 Research and in 1980 the Laswell Award from the International Society for Political Psychology. The University of Strathclyde awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1970 . He was also accepted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1961 and the National Academy of Sciences in 1980. The Survey Research Center awards a scholarship named after him in memory of Angus Campbell .

Fonts (selection)

  • The People Elect a President. Ann Arbor 1952
  • The Voter Decides. Evanston 1954
  • The American Voter. New York 1960
  • Elections and the Political Order. New York 1966
  • White Attitudes Toward Black People. Ann Arbor 1971
  • The Human Meaning of Social Change. New York 1972
  • The Quality of American Life: Perceptions, Evaluations, and Satisfaction. New York 1976
  • The Sense of Well-Being in America: Recent Patterns and Trends. New York 1980

literature

  • Clyde H. Coombs: Angus Campbell 1910-1980. Series: Biographical Memoirs. Volume 56. National Academy of Sciences, Washington DC 1987, ISBN 0-309-03693-3 , pp. 42–59 (with picture and bibliography; online version )
  • Kai Arzheimer : Angus Campbell / Philip E. Converse / Warren E. Miller / Donald E. Stokes, The American Voter, New York 1960. In: Steffen Kailitz (Ed.): Key works of political science. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2007, ISBN 978-3-531-14005-6 , pp. 67–72
  • Edward G. Carmines, James Wood: Campbell, Albert Angus. In: Glenn H. Utter, Charles Lockhart: American Political Scientists: A Dictionary. Greenwood Press, Westport 2002, ISBN 0-31-331957-X , pp. 57/58
  • Campbell, Angus (1910-1980). In: Raymond J. Corsini (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Psychology. Wiley, New York 1994, ISBN 0-47-186594-X , Volume 1, p. 178

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Clyde H. Coombs, Washington DC 1987, p. 43 (see literature)
  2. ↑ a b c d Clyde H. Coombs, Washington DC 1987, p. 44 (see literature)
  3. ↑ Clyde H. Coombs, Washington DC 1987, p. 45 (see literature)
  4. ↑ Campbell, Jean Winter. In: Who's Who of American Women, 1983–1984. Marquis Who's Who, Chicago 1983, ISBN 0-83-790413-7 , p. 121
  5. ↑ a b c d Thomas Ennis: Angus Campbell, 70; Social researcher. Obituary in: The New York Times . December 16, 1980 edition, p. D21
  6. ↑ Glenn H. Utter, Charles Lockhart, Westport 2002, p. 57 (see literature)
  7. ↑ Clyde H. Coombs, Washington DC 1987, pp. 46/47 (see literature)
  8. ↑ Clyde H. Coombs, Washington DC 1987, p. 52 (see literature)
  9. ↑ Clyde H. Coombs, Washington DC 1987, p. 47 (see literature)
  10. ↑ Kai Arzheimer, Wiesbaden 2007, p. 69 (see literature)
  11. ↑ Kai Arzheimer, Wiesbaden 2007, p. 70 (see literature)
  12. ↑ A problem to be explained: motivational differences by time of vote decision. In: Angus Campbell and others: The American Voter. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1980, ISBN 0-22-609254-2 , pp. 78/79
  13. ^ A Classification of Presidential Elections. In: Angus Campbell and others: The American Voter. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1980, ISBN 0-22-609254-2 , pp. 531-538
  14. ^ Angus Campbell and others: The American Voter. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1980, ISBN 0-22-609254-2 , pp. 531/532
  15. ^ Angus Campbell and others: The American Voter. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1980, ISBN 0-22-609254-2 , pp. 532/533
  16. ^ Angus Campbell and others: The American Voter. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1980, ISBN 0-22-609254-2 , pp. 534/535
  17. ↑ a b Glenn H. Utter, Charles Lockhart, Westport 2002, p. 58 (see literature)
  18. ^ Angus Campbell: Surge and Decline: A Study of Electoral Change. In: Public Opinion Quarterly. 24 (3) / 1960. American Association for Public Opinion Research, pp. 397-418, ISSN  0033-362X
  19. ^ The Premises of Surge and Decline. In: James E. Campbell: The Presidential Pulse of Congressional Elections. University Press of Kentucky, Lexington 1997, ISBN 0-81-310926-4 , pp. 22-39 (especially pp. 29/30)
  20. ^ The Premises of Surge and Decline. In: James E. Campbell: The Presidential Pulse of Congressional Elections. University Press of Kentucky, Lexington 1997, ISBN 0-81-310926-4 , pp. 22-39 (especially pp. 34/35)
  21. ^ A b Philip E. Converse: On the Passing of Angus Campbell. In: American Journal of Economics and Sociology. 40 (4) / 1981. Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 341/342, ISSN  0002-9246
  22. ^ Manfred Mols, Hans-Joachim Lauth: Political Science: An Introduction. UTB, Paderborn, Munich, Vienna and Zurich 2003, ISBN 3-82-521789-2 , p. 303
  23. ↑ Theodore Rosenof: Realignment: The Theory did Changed the Way We think about American Politics. Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham 2003, ISBN 0-74-253105-8 , p. 64
  24. ↑ Theodore Rosenof: Realignment: The Theory did Changed the Way We think about American Politics. Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham 2003, ISBN 0-74-253105-8 , p. 65
  25. ↑ Theodore Rosenof: Realignment: The Theory did Changed the Way We think about American Politics. Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham 2003, ISBN 0-74-253105-8 , p. 66
  26. ↑ a b c d e Kai Arzheimer, Wiesbaden 2007, p. 71 (see literature)
  27. ^ Louis Sandy Maisel, Kara Z. Buckley: Parties and Elections in America: The Electoral Process. Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham 2005, ISBN 0-74-252670-4 , p. 97
  28. ↑ a b c d Daniel Katz: In Memoriam. Angus Campbell, 1910-1980. In: Public Opinion Quarterly. 45 (1) / 1981. Oxford Journals, pp. 124/125 (Erratum in Volume 45 (2) / 1981, pp. 283), ISSN  0033-362X
  29. ↑ Theodore Rosenof: Realignment: The Theory did Changed the Way We think about American Politics. Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham 2003, ISBN 0-74-253105-8 , p. 63
  30. ↑ Kai Arzheimer, Wiesbaden 2007, p. 68 (see literature)
  31. ↑ Dieter Roth: Empirical election research: origin, theories, instruments and methods. Verlag für Sozialwesen, Wiesbaden 2008, ISBN 3-53-115786-8 , p. 171
  32. ↑ University of Michigan - Institute for Social Research: Financial Support (accessed May 4, 2010)
personal data
SURNAME Campbell, Angus
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Campbell, Albert Angus
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American social psychologist and election researcher
DATE OF BIRTH August 10, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Head , Indiana
DATE OF DEATH December 15, 1980
Place of death Ann Arbor , Michigan
This article was added to the list of excellent articles on May 22, 2010 in this version .