Paul Lazarsfeld Quotes
Electoral choices are relatively invulnerable to direct argumentation and characterized more by faith than by conviction and by wishful expectation rather than careful prediction of consequences.
Paul Lazarsfeld, 1950s Quoted in "The Irrational Electorate", The Wilson Quarterly, August 2008
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The Democrat campaign operators, led by Robert Woolley, for the first time in an American Presidential campaign, used all the new techniques of public relations and advertising that had been developed. Many observers like the New Republic editors saw this in a negative light for American democracy. They wanted the old method where people met the candidates and had discussions with candidates or heard from others who had. It was in retrospect an editorial of nostalgia, as the country was growing so much that voter “acquaintance” with Presidential candidates was becoming more and more difficult.
One of the ideas to implement the Partition of India to create a Muslim Pakistan was to have plebiscites in many provinces to vote on whether the Province should remain with India or be a part of Pakistan. The Punjab was the largest of the mixed religion areas in question but the Punjab governor was opposed to the idea as most of the voters were illiterate and the Pro Pakistan forces would couch the alternatives in stark religious terms to the Muslim voters who will not realize that they could remain as Muslims in India just as they were at the time. In a number of areas—Kashmir being the most notable—there were a majority of Muslims yet enough of them preferred to remain with India than be part of Pakistan as they were Islamic moderates and did not want to be part of a Muslim Pakistan that might pressure them or force them to a more rigid form of Islam. Also many valued democracy and religious freedom. Some doubted Pakistan's likelihood of thriving in its own and preferred the stability of India.
Referring to a letter from the Republican National Committee intimating that Speaker of the House-designate Thomas Foley was homosexual:
Paul Felix Lazarsfeld was an Austrian-American sociologist. The founder of Columbia University's Bureau of Applied Social Research, he exerted influence over the techniques and the organization of social research. "It is not so much that he was an American sociologist," one colleague said of him after his death, "as it was that he determined what American sociology would be." Lazarsfeld said that his goal was "to produce Paul Lazarsfelds".:3 The two main accomplishments he is associated with can be analyzed within two lenses of analysis: research institutes, methodology, as well as his research content itself. He was a founding figure in 20th-century empirical sociology.
