Studying the social sciences gives a voice to the voiceless
August 30, 2024
Contact: Jon Meerdink ([email protected])
ANN ARBOR — The social sciences can be summed up simply as a mission to understand why people do what they do and think what they think. This rubric works across nearly every discipline of the social sciences, from economics to health-related studies to in-depth political research.
This research alone is important, but its applications are even more critical. In fact, they could be foundational to the operation of our democracy.
Writing for the Consortium of Social Science Associations’ (COSSA) “Why Social Science?” blog, Josh Pasek, Ph.D., writes that studying the social sciences offers crucial context to the operation of elections, giving representation to people and groups in ways that elections themselves may not.
“Election results don’t tell us who made which choices or what their motivations might have been. Indeed, knowing only who won does not reveal whether voters were expressing a preference for the candidate they chose or against that candidate’s opponent. So, although representatives often begin their terms in office asserting that they have a mandate to lead, the results of elections provide little insight into what, if anything, that mandate is for.
Public opinion surveys fill this gap. They contextualize the results of elections, allowing us to discern who made which choices, what they were thinking about, and how the events and messages of a campaign cycle shaped the ways people came to their decisions.”
Pasek, a faculty associate at ISR’s Center for Political Studies, studies the effects of new media on political processes. In his COSSA piece, he argues that public opinion polling — and the proper use of polling data by media outlets — is a crucial but often overlooked part of modern American politics.
The full piece, titled “Because People Can’t Be Represented If We Don’t Know What They Think,” is available via COSSA. Pasek is the second ISR faculty member to write for COSSA this year; Narayan Sastry, Ph.D., of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) published a piece for COSSA in July.