Another method which has recently become increasingly important and is being widely used in the study of political phenomena is the Statistical or Quantitative method.
It attempts to describe and measure in quantitative terms and is especially applied to the study of political parties and public opinion.
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The statistical technique has also been extended to the study of comparative government and international relations. David Thomson is of the opinion that “until some such statistical and sociological technique is applied to international relations, the science of studying international relations will make little further progress in method.”
The analysis of public opinion is as old as Plato, but as a field of scientific investigation with the aid of statistical tools it is only a generation old. In the immediate background are such writers as Tonnies, Tarde, Le Bon, Wallas and Bryce. But two books, Lawrence Lowell’s Public Opinion and Popular Government, and Walter Lipmann’s Public Opinion “did much to delineate the field in terms meaningful to American political science.”
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Especially following Lipmann’s work, public opinion has become a field of specialization in American Universities. The application of statistical techniques to the analysis of various types of political and governmental data has been advanced by Stuart Rice, Louis Bean, Harold F. Gosnell and others.
H. Dewey Anderson and Percy E. Davidson have applied the statistical technique to such widely varied fields as voting motivation, occupational mobility as it affects state-governmental operations, occupational trends upon a national and local basis, and concentration of economic power and its effect on political power.
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In some of the Western countries “public opinion polls” or “Gallup polls” are held. If skillfully framed and conducted, such polls have shown themselves, in Britain as in America, to be capable of a high degree of accuracy.
It is, however, necessary to exercise great care in the collection and use of the statistics. Lowell has aptly said that “statistics, like real pies, are good if you know the person who made them, and are sure of the ingredients” as “by themselves they are strangely likely to mislead, because unless the subject is understood in all its bearings, some element can easily be left out of account which wholly falsifies the result.”
To put it rather bluntly, there are three kinds of lies, the white, black and statistics, and it is the last kind which is so difficult to nail or counteract. Statistics are manipulated to suit the party purposes and explained to distort the facts for electoral gains and political maneuvering. It cannot, however, be denied that a knowledge of statistical principles and sampling method is often useful to the political scientists.