What is „public opinion“ ? L 1 Ing. Jiří Šnajdar 2014.

What is „public opinion“ ?

L 1

Ing. Jiří Šnajdar 2014

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Public Opinion

What is „public opinion“?

Multilayer character of the term.

Various disciplinary approaches to public opinion. Public opinion as social-historical phenomenon.

Pre-modern and modern concept of the public.

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Public Opinion

Opinion of the public is clearly a modern phenomenon: its origin and development are connected with the spirit of the Enlightenment, which, in a reciprocal influence with the development of natural sciences but also historical political thought in parallel with the present state and civil society on which it is founded in a permanent struggle with once ruling but now weaker and weaker religious-theological mental world, up till now has never been fully materialized and, under the influence of deeply moving events, experiences ever new blows that hamper and sometimes destructively influence public opinion formation.

Ferdinand Tönnies (1922),

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Public Opinion

It may be argued that public opinion represents one example of an important class of political ideas known as “essentially contested concepts” (Gallie1956).

In short, essentially contested concepts have no definitive meaning that isaccepted by all scholars. There is agreement on key features of what constitutes public opinion, but not the relationship between these essential characteristics. First of all, in order to have public opinion by definition there must be a ‘public’– but what or who constitutes the public?

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Public Opinion

In summary, public opinion is seen to be the formation, communication and measurement of individual citizens’ attitudes toward public affairs. This perspective raises the important question: what is the link between individual attitudes and aggregated public opinion?

Rival models of the linkage between individual and collective opinions.

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Public Opinion

Within political science there is no definitive view on what the term ‘public opinion’ means, and this concept is used in systematically different ways by different subfields within the discipline.

The discussion above focussed mainly on the‘public’ aspect of the public opinion concept. Here we will move the argument forward by considering the micro-macro link between individual citizen’s attitudes and overall public opinion.

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Public Opinion

Public opinion is an aggregation of individual opinions. Public opinion is simply the sum of all individual opinions.

Simple aggregation of one-personone-vote data is often used as a justification of associating opinion polls results as being coterminous with public opinion. This is because a defining feature of most societies is material inequality and differences in social status and influence.

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Public Opinion

Public opinion is based on majority beliefs. Public opinion is based fundamentally on social norms and conventions adhered to by most people in society. The underlying idea here is that individuals conform to what their social group think. This is the conception used by Elizabeth Noelle-Neumann (1974) in her “spiral of silence” hypothesis where she argued that individuals find out what themajority think, form a private opinion, and if this matches with majority opinion they express this view publicly, otherwise they remain silent so as not to attract any sanctions from the majority.

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Public Opinion

The consequence of this situation of conformity is that all minority opinions are censored both explicitly and implicitly.

Public opinion results from the clash of group interests. Here public opinion is seen to be a product of interest group activity. The emphasis is on the relative power between competing interest groups who debate with one another in the public arena. While individual opinions do exist, what is seen to be most important is the articulation of such views by interest groups who lobby on such individuals’ behalf.

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Public Opinion

Public opinion is media and elite opinion. From this perspective public opinion is simply whatever most citizens have been told by elites in the media. Consequently, public opinion is in reality simply a somewhat noisier version of elite opinion. In this vein, Walter Lippmann (1922) contended that it is largely impossible for most citizens to be informed about public policy; and as a result it is neither practical nor desirable for citizens to have an influence on public policy.

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Public Opinion

Public opinion does not exist. Some have argued that public opinion is just an empty phrase with no real meaning where those in the media and politics use the term as a rhetorical device to justify their arguments without any real evidence. Critics such as Pierre Bourdieu (1973) have argued that the language used in survey questions to ask for political opinions is often not that used by citizens.

That the political attitudes measured in typical mass surveys are not real; and hence aggregated measurements of public opinion are little more than the methodological artefacts of survey interviews.

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Public Opinion

In reality, each of the five models or definitions of public opinion noted above have both strengths and weaknesses.

So for example, public opinion in authoritarian states tends to have a rhetorical nature while in democratic states the conception of public attitudes has a more reflexive and critical nature.

In other words, there is no single definition of public opinion or political attitudes. Most commentators on public opinion have adopted the advice offered by the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) almost two centuries ago in adopting this ambiguous term primarily because of its common usage. Cutler 1999: 325;Ben-Dor 2000: 191–236, 2007: 222–223

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Public Opinion

Significantly, a century or so later in 1925, the first academic conference on “public opinion” held by the American Political Science Association was divided into three groups.

The first group argued that public opinion did not really exist.

The second group while believing that public opinion did exist did not feel they could define it properly; while the last group argued that not only did public opinion exist, but it could also be defined. The consensus at the time seemed to be that it was better to “avoid the use of the term public opinion if possible” (Binkley 1928: 389).

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Public Opinion

But the current consensus adopts (a) the Benthamite view that ‘public opinion’ is a useful shorthand for referring to collective citizen preferences and (b) the measurement of citizen attitudes is fundamentally important in the understanding democratic politics.

One reason, why there have been such disparate views on the nature and importance of citizen attitudes and public opinion more generally stems from the variety of perspectives that have been used to study public opinion.

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Public Opinion

For students of politics, this definitional question is important to the extent that citizen attitudes and public opinion is seen to influence public policy making.

The implication sometimes taken is that there can be a single public opinion on important issues, and that this is the basis for something called the ‘national will.’ Sociologists and communications researchers focus on public opinion as being a product of information dissemination and social interaction.

From this perspective, public opinion often does not have a political content and in many situations there is no single public opinion; but many opinions only some of which are heeded by government.

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Public Opinion

Consequentialist accounts of individual and collective opinion often make arguments using such terms as the “will of the people” and hence implicitly adhere to Machiavelli’s force conception or Rousseau’s communitarian view of public opinion. More recently, this macro conception of citizens’ attitudes, beliefs and values has eschewed an atomistic conception of society (a model that is, as noted earlier, a fundamental element in the assumptions of representative sampling where respondents are equal but independent or isolated from one another) and views public opinion as an emergent property of social interaction (Durkheim 1895/1982; Parsons 1937).

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Public Opinion

Within the empirical social sciences, one early influential view of what public opinion is, and is not, pointed out that attempts to treat public opinion as “an entity to be discovered and then studied will meet with scant success” (Allport 1937: 23).

In other words, macro-level models of individual and collective attitudes are flawed because they are based on assumptions that cannot be directly measured and tested.

Consequently, it is only possible to scientifically study public opinion at the individual level using experiments or surveys.

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Public Opinion

The key idea here is that collective opinion acts through the behaviour of individuals, which are observable and hence measurable; the same cannot be said for units defined in terms of “group mind” or “group property.”

This means that public opinion is not an object but a “situation.” Floyd H. Allport (1937: 23) summarised this argument and defined public opinion as follows:

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Public Opinion

The term public opinion is given its meaning with reference to a multi-individual situation in which individuals are expressing themselves, or can be called upon to express themselves, as favouring or supporting (or else disfavouring or opposing) some definite condition, person, or proposal of widespread importance, in such a proportion of number, intensity and constancy, as to give rise to the probability of affecting action, directly or indirectly, toward the object concerned.

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Public Opinion

This perspective has become the mainstream one. One succinct contemporary definition is that “public opinion is what opinion polls try to measure or what they try to measure with modest error” (Converse 1987: S14).

From this perspective the public’s opinion or mood is something that can be constructed from a large number of survey questions and polls (Stimson 1995). However, this is only part of the story. There is a science of opinion and attitudes; and it is fundamentally important in assessing the importance of survey data to understand the scientific basis for attitude measurement.

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Public Opinion

The idea that there are individual political attitudes that may be aggregated to something called ‘public opinion’ has a long history.

While the way in which political attitudes and public opinion are measured has changed through history, so also has the concept itself.

For a long period from ancient Greece and Rome through the Middle Ages until the French Revolution ‘public opinion’ was equated with elite opinion.

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Public Opinion

This conception of public opinion was based on the view that elites constituted the ‘public’ and it was only this group who were sufficiently well informed to express views or ‘opinions’ on matters of public importance.

With the Enlightenment and the French Revolution the meaning of the term ‘public opinion’ changed dramatically. From the late eighteenth century onwards ‘public opinion’ became increasingly associated with the general population and not with small groups of wealthy, educated citizens.

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Public Opinion

It is of course no coincidence that the emergence of the broad contemporary conceptualisation of public opinion arose with the development of liberal democratic political systems. Enlightenment ideas with their emphasis on the importance of the ‘individual’ who should have the freedom to pursue his or her own preferences and goals created the intellectual roots in which public opinion as a political force became recognised by a wide variety of political thinkers such as Jeremy Bentham, James (Lord) Bryce, Ferdinand Tönnies and James Madison to name but a few. In essence, with the growth of mass suffrage the opinions of all citizens began to have a more direct and salient impact on government.

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Public Opinion

Technology played a key role in the evolution of the concept of public opinion. With the development of newspapers and postal networks i.e. systems capable of dispersing large volumes of information widely and frequently, the basic foundations of a mass based system of public opinion were created.

With the emergence of the Internet and World Wide Web there is considerable debate as to what impact this technology will have on public opinion and political behaviour.

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Public Opinion

At present there is no clear consensus on this issue. Notwithstanding such contemporary developments, this chapter will focus (a) on the evolution of theories of public opinion and (b) the desirability and necessity of citizen influence on government.

The overview of theorising on citizen’s political attitudes and their aggregation into public opinion presented in this chapter will adopt a broadly chronological approach.

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Public Opinion

Early conceptions of public opinion

The concept of public opinion has a long history; however, it was not until the eighteenth century that is was first examined in any systematic manner.

Prior to the Enlightenment public opinion was discussed but always with reference to more general theories of politics and the state. In addition, one can trace back to the earliest political theories positive and negative views of public opinion.

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Public Opinion

For example, Plato in the Phaedrus and in The Republic (Book VII, ‘The Simile of the Cave’) while accepting that public opinion existed denied its value seeing it as inferior form of knowledge. In contrast, Aristotle in his Politics (Book III, part XI) argued that collective opinion is superior to individual opinion. Significantly, Thucydides in the History of the Peloponnesian War structured his analysis on the basis of the distribution, formation and impact of public opinion (Benson 1968: 532). Later Roman writers such as Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC) took a negative view of public opinion: and as a result did not discuss the concept.