Opinion Research and the West German Public in the Postwar Decades*

Abstract

Abstract This article investigates the history of opinion research in West Germany in the decades following the Second World War, which witnessed the emergence of a dense network of research institutes, including the Institut für Demoskopie-Allensbach (IfD), Emnid and Infratest. It argues that ‘opinion research’—a term used to encompass political polling as well as market research—helped consolidate an emerging West German consumer society based on liberal, free-market capitalism and offered West Germans new ways of imagining this new national collective. The opinion surveys and the subjectivities they measured were mutually constitutive of this reconfigured ‘public’, as exposure to survey results in countless media reports both reflected and shaped popular understandings of self and society. To make this argument, the article explores the US influence on German opinion research from the 1920s to the 1960s and the ‘modern’ language and techniques of survey research in the FRG. It offers an account of sex research as a case study of the same and concludes with a brief discussion of opinion research and its role in shaping contemporary understandings of the public sphere.