Mediating public opinion: The Gallup poll between statistical attraction and science, 1941-1955

In 1941, Svenska Gallupinstitutet (the Swedish Gallup Institute) was founded and started making opinion polls and market research with new American sampling methods. The newspapers that subscribed to the polls soon began publishing polls on all kinds of subjects as a form of entertaining content. At the same time, this practice was used for market research, and in the late 1940s, academics grew increasingly interested in using these methods for studying society. Furthermore, various political actors had differing views on the legitimacy of the poll's representations of public opinion.

This dissertation aims to study the Gallup poll as a new medium in Sweden during the 1940s and 1950s, when its meaning and its use was still undetermined and under negotiation. With perspectives from media history and the history of knowledge, it outlines how this media technology was entangled with other media, how its representations were dicsussed, and how it changed the conditions for how society could be known and represented.