American history is replete with examples of systematic attempts to control who votes – and how people vote when they do. The most obvious of these attempts have been the use of gender and race restrictions, property ownership requirements, poll taxes, literacy tests, and onerous voter-registration procedures. But since the mid-to-late 1800s, attempts to influence the outcomes of elections have increasingly relied on political communications, political marketing research, and the scientific methods they employ, in efforts to both mobilize and demobilize voters and alter their attitudes and preferences.
Today’s efforts to influence political behavior with sociological data are enabled by massive databases, blinding data-processing speed, and the ability to target (or exclude) voters with incentivizing or disincentivizing stimuli, including political information that is completely false. Data and Democracy is a historical investigation of the use of social science data in political communications, campaign strategies, and targeted media, and how these methods of gathering and using data to segment the population have reshaped American politics historically and in the present day – making it increasingly uncompetitive and undemocratic.
Archival image sources: census document: United States Census Bureau; rural interviewer: Critical Past.
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