Propaganda studies in American social science: The rise and fall of the critical paradigm

During the 1920s and 1930s, a critical framework for analysis of social influence, called propaganda analysis, gained sway in American social science. The epistemic rationale of the paradigm was its ability to explain the phenomenon of modern mass persuasion. The paradigm's ideological appeal came through its ability to widen citizen participation in society and its match with postwar disillusionment and Depression‐era skepticism. By the late 1930s, the epistemic germ of propaganda analysis was weakened by the growing tendency to equate science with statistical and experimental methods; and its ideological roots were withered by attacks on social critics and demands for academe to aid in national mobilization. Critical propaganda studies were displaced by a rival paradigm, called communication research, the latter able to render useful and politically noncontroversial wartime and postwar service to government and private grantors.