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Individuals and Aggregates

A Note on Historical Data and Assumptions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Paul F. Bourke  and
Donald A. DeBats
Paul F. Bourke
Affiliation:
The Flinders University of South Australia, Bedford Park, Australia
Donald A. DeBats
Affiliation:
The Flinders University of South Australia, Bedford Park, Australia
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Extract

After more than a decade's impressive achievement in the “new” social history and the “new” political history, two distinct though related problems require us to reconsider the data appropriate to these inquiries. First, recent commentators (Foner, 1974; Formi-sano, 1976) have pointed to the relative failure of research in these areas to converge, a failure made more obvious in the light of the programmatic optimism of the 1960s which held out the prospect of an integrated approach to the social basis of politics and to the political implications of social structure. Second, there has been in recent years some acknowledgment by historians (see below) of the vexing question of inferences across levels of data, a matter central to other social sciences and particularly pressing for historians of electoral behavior.

Type
Research Note
Information
Social Science History , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , Spring 1980 , pp. 229 - 250
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1980 

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Footnotes

fn00

Author's Note:Research on the project reported here has been made possible through the generous support of the Australian Research Grants Committee.

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