Charting Dutch Democracy

This article unravels the appropriation of electoral opinion polls by Dutch public broadcasters and their deployment in radio and television formats from the 1960s until the 1980s. Rather than engaging with the mediatisation narrative that communication and media scholars use to grasp the media’s use of opinion polls, this article historicises the developments that have led to opinion polls becoming mass media marvels. This article demonstrates that Dutch broadcasters used polls to claim a crucial role for themselves as the intermediaries between political elites on the one hand and the electo... Mehr ...