Campbell, Angus

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Campbell, Angus 1910-1980

Angus Campbell was born in Indiana, but grew up in Portland, Oregon. He studied psychology at the University of Oregon, and completed his doctorate at Stanford University in 1936 under E. R. Hilgard. He taught at Northwestern University for six years, until World War II brought him to Washington, D.C., to study effects of the war on the public. He was introduced there to large sample surveys, as well as a group of like-minded social scientists headed by the psychologist Rensis Likert.

After the war Likert, Campbell, and colleagues moved to Ann Arbor, establishing the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. Likert headed the institute, and Campbell became director of its largest component, the Survey Research Center (SRC). Here he enjoyed a field staff of interviewers spread over the country who produced valid national samples according to the strictest precepts of modern sampling theory. He also had access to the university’s economists, sociologists, social psychologists, and public health experts who were excited by the new capability to represent the nation with a modest sample of one thousand or two thousand respondents.

While various scholars did studies through SRC every year, Campbell directed a few personally to address his own wide-ranging interests. He launched a national study of voters before and after the 1952 presidential election. This study has been repeated biennially (to include “off -year” congressional elections) ever since. This series yields an amazing panorama of trends in America’s democratic processes for more than a half-century.

From the outset Campbell believed that party loyalties are a dominant force in the voting decision, but that voters defect from these loyalties occasionally, depending on the candidates and issues of the day. He wrote a central question to measure such underlying party identification, which remains a critical component of voting studies today.

Among the hundreds of publications from the election series over the years, Campbell and collaborators Philip Converse, Warren Miller, and Donald Stokes wrote a synthesis of early progress, The American Voter (1960), which achieved very wide circulation. Its impact was strong on political science as a discipline, which hitherto had focused mainly on historical and institutional studies. This “behavioral science revolution” brought quantification, hypothesis-testing, and estimation of causal flows to the discipline of political science, lending new weight to the “science” in its name. The international impact was also large: Foreign scholars visiting SRC were soon organizing parallel voting studies in their own democracies in Western Europe. By 2006 election studies had spread to nearly four dozen nations, and were intercommunicating to match measurements in order to maximize comparative studies of the voting process.

Campbell himself moved on to other topics. In the civil rights ferment of the 1960s he studied change in U.S. interracial attitudes. By the 1970s he turned to studies of the quality of life as perceived by the U.S. population. Once again, this subject rapidly became popular, and as before, the primary question Campbell wrote to measure a person’s most global sense of well-being remains an essential item for replications of such studies here and abroad.

SEE ALSO American National Election Studies (ANES); Attitudes, Racial; Behaviorism; Consumerism; Elections; Happiness; Likert Scale; Miller, Warren; Social Welfare Functions; Survey; Voting Patterns; Welfare