The Literary Digest
The Literary Digest was a widely read American magazine that was published weekly from 1890 to 1938. With the literary digest disaster of 1936, she is best known today for the event that heralded her downfall. The magazine was published by Funk & Wagnalls in New York City .
history
From 1890 the magazine was published by Isaac Kaufmann Funk , with which two similar weekly magazines, the Public Opinion and the Current Opinion , were continued.
In the first edition, the focus was on opinion articles, the analysis of news and the summary of articles from American, Canadian and European publications. After Isaac Funk's death in 1912, Robert Joseph Cuddihy became the new editor. In 1927 the circulation reached the 1 million mark. After the literary digest disaster , the magazine merged with the Review of Reviews magazine in 1938 and was finally discontinued shortly afterwards. The subscribers list was of Time Inc. bought.
The title pages of The Literary Digest were illustrated only from the beginning of the 20th century. Famous paintings were printed in color on the title pages in the 1920s, and the latest editions showed various photographic and photomontage techniques.
A standing column called The Lexicographer's Easy Chair was written by Frank Horace Vizetelly .
The literary digest disaster
Beginning in 1916, The Literary Digest conducted public opinion polls in the run-up to the presidential election in the United States to predict who would be the winner. This was achieved in five presidential elections ( 1916 , 1920 , 1924 , 1928 , 1932 ).
For the 1936 presidential election , The Literary Digest conducted another survey to find out who would win the election: incumbent Franklin D. Roosevelt of the Democrats or his challenger Alf Landon of the Republicans . To this end, around 10 million voters were written to or called, of which around 2.4 million answered.
With about 60 percent of respondents voting for Alf Landon, The Literary Digest, in its October 31st issue, predicted that Landon would win 370 of 531 electoral votes . This seemed plausible, since the Republicans had also won the gubernatorial elections in Maine in September and the wisdom was As Maine goes, so goes the nation . Since the magazine had correctly predicted the election result in the previous five presidential elections, the prediction of The Literary Digest had special weight. However, when the results of the presidential election on November 3rd were known, Franklin D. Roosevelt received 60.8 percent of the vote. Alf Landon could only win in two states: Vermont and Maine. He won only 8 electoral votes in total, while Roosevelt won 523.
Two mistakes were made in the selection of the sample during the survey . On the one hand, the 10 million respondents were selected from telephone directories, registered car owners, lists of members of certain associations and subscribers to the magazine. Owning a car, a telephone or the reference of The Literary Digest was after the Great Depression only well-off households who chose more Republican. However, as has been shown, the main problem was that answering the questionnaire was voluntary. The return of the questionnaire depended on how interested the respondent was in the election; this was obviously more the case with the Roosevelt opponents than with the Roosevelt supporters:
“... respondents who returned their questionnaires represented only that subset of the population with a relatively intense interest in the subject at hand, and as such constitute in no sense a random sample ... it seems clear that the minority of anti-Roosevelt voters felt more strongly about the election than did the pro-Roosevelt majority. "
"... Respondents who returned their questionnaires only represented the subset of the population that had a relatively high interest in the subject and as such are in no way a random sample ... it seems clear that the minority of the anti-Roosevelt -Voters were more interested in the election than the pro-Roosevelt majority. "
In addition, there was the fact, which has often been observed to this day, that members of the middle class tend to respond more to written inquiries than people with a rather low income. Since the middle class at that time was more republican and the lower social classes more democratic, this increased the non-response bias .
In parallel, George Gallup conducted an opinion poll based on a quota sample with only 50,000 respondents and thus correctly predicted the election result. In a letter to the editor, he wrote that The Literary Digest would make a false prediction. During the summer of 1936, Gallup replicated the Literary Digest survey in its own sample of 3,000 respondents with similar socio-demographic characteristics.
The literary digest disaster led to a profound overhaul of survey and selection techniques in public opinion and poll research and is often viewed as the beginning of modern scholarly opinion research .
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Press: Digest Digested . In: Time , May 23, 1938. Retrieved March 8, 2010.
- ↑ A word a day Man: a biography . In: Biographical essay . Center d'études du 19e siècle français Joseph Sablé .. Archived from the original on August 6, 2010. Information: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved October 18, 2010.
- ^ A b c Maurice C. Bryson: The Literary Digest Poll: Making of a Statistical Myth . In: The American Statistician . tape 30 , no. 4 November 1976, pp. 184-185 , JSTOR : 2683758 .
- ↑ a b Raimund Alt: Statistics. An introduction for economists . Linde Verlag, Vienna 2013 ISBN 978-3-7143-0228-8 pp. 325f.
literature
- David Freedman, Robert Pisani, Roger Purves: Statistics . 4th edition. Norton , New York City 2007, ISBN 0-393-92972-8 , pp. 697 (English).