Transcript Snímek 1

What is „public opinion“ ?
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Ing. Jiří Šnajdar
2016
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.
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Ferdinand Tönnies (1922),
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 is accepted 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 micromacro 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 the majority 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.
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Cutler 1999: 325;Ben-Dor 2000: 191–236, 2007: 222–223
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.
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