Alexander Langstaff

This dissertation examines the emergence of public opinion research in Austria and Czechoslovakia. From interwar debates about ‘plebiscitary democracy’ to the post-socialist emergence of ‘Samizdat surveying’, via postwar reconstruction, consumerism, and prognostics, I tell a story about the forgotten work of pollsters in Vienna and Prague. Broadly, I hope to offer an alternative account of the postwar social sciences that decenters unidirectional transatlantic narratives.