The Hoover Elite Studies Revisited

Abstract

Project RADIR (“Revolution and the Development of International Relations”), conducted at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution in the years following the Second World War, was probably the first large-scale, quantitatively-based empirical research enterprise in contemporary political science. Inspired Dy the theories of Harold D. Lasswell about world revolutionary developments in the modern era, the project was in some respects the successor to work done in wartime Washington at the Library of Congress by Lasswell’s Experimental Division for the Study of Wartime Communications, and by the Organizations and Propaganda Analysis Section that Lasswell had helped to set up in the Special War Policies Unit of the Department of Justice. When published in the early fifties, the Hoover Studies, as they came to be called, were noted not only for their substantive findings but also for their theoretical suggestiveness and their methodological boldness of overall design. Most pre-war empirical, quantitative work in political science had been hyperfactual, but the Hoover Studies represented a genuine break with that tradition. Some early reviewers, if not ignorant of quantitative analysis, had trouble with the project’s theoretical formulations, and others were methodologically innocent.^ The methodological novelty of the Hoover Studies consisted in the demonstration that quantitative data could be generated out of the verbal contents found in newspapers and conventional biographies. Although some political scientists had made use of aggregate data reported in the Census, government budgets, legislative roll-calls and electoral statistics, the notion that one can “create” one’s own massive body of data was still relatively new at mid-century. Public opinion polls had come into existence only in the middle thirties and had yet to be exploited fully for scientific purposes. It was in this research context that the Hoover Studies were published.