Public Opinion
Public opinion
• Public opinion is the collective opinion on a
specific topic or voting intention relevant to a
society. It is the people's views on matters
affecting them.
History
• The emergence of public opinion as a
significant force in the political realm dates to
the late 17th century, but opinion had been
regarded as having singular importance much
earlier.
• Later, William Shakespeare called public
opinion the "mistress of success" and Blaise
Pascal thought it was "the queen of the
world".
Ferdinand Tönnies
Ferdinand Tönnies
• The German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies, by using
the conceptional tools of his theory
of Gemeinschaft (social relations between
individuals, based on close personal and family ties;
community) and Gesellschaft (social relations based
on impersonal ties, such as duty to a society or
organization), argued that 'public opinion' has the
equivalent social function in societies
(Gesellschaften) which religion has in communities
(Gemeinschaften).
Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas
• German social theorist Jürgen Habermas contributed the idea
of public sphere to the discussion of public opinion.
• According to Habermas, the public sphere, or bourgeois public, is
where "something approaching public opinion can be formed".
• Habermas claimed that the Public Sphere featured universal
access, rational debate, and disregard for rank.
• However, he believes that these three features for how public
opinion are best formed are no longer in place in western liberal
democratic countries.
• Public opinion, in western democracy, is highly susceptible to
elite manipulation.
Herbert Blumer
Herbert Blumer
• The American sociologist Herbert Blumer has
proposed an altogether different conception of the
"public".
• According to Blumer, public opinion is discussed as a
form of collective behavior (another specialized term)
which is made up of those who are discussing a given
public issue at any one time.
• Given this definition, there are many publics; each of
them comes into being when an issue arises and
ceases to exist when the issue is resolved.
Herbert Blumer
• Blumer claims that people participate in public in
different capacities and to different degrees. So,
public opinion polling cannot measure the public.
• An educated individual's participation is more
important than that of a drunk.
• The "mass" in which people independently make
decisions about, for example, which brand of
toothpaste to buy, is a form of collective behavior
different from the public.
Public Opinion in Political Sphere
• Public opinion plays an important role in the political
sphere.
• Cutting across all aspects of relationship between
government and public opinion are studies of voting
behavior.
• These have registered the distribution of opinions on a
wide variety of issues, have explored the impact of
special interest groups on election outcomes and have
contributed to our knowledge about the effects of
government propaganda and policy.
Contemporary, quantitative approaches
• Contemporary, quantitative approaches to the study of
public opinion may be divided into four categories:
1. Quantitative measurement of opinion distributions.
2. Investigation of the internal relationships among the
individual opinions that make up public opinion on an issue.
3. Description or analysis of the public role of public opinion.
4. Study both of the communication media that disseminate
the ideas on which opinions are based and of the uses that
propagandists and other manipulators make of these
media.
Obtaining Public Opinion
• The rapid spread of public opinion
measurement around the world is reflection
of the number of uses to which it can be put.
• Public opinion can be accurately obtained
through survey sampling.
• Both private firms and governments
use surveys to inform public policies and
public relations.
FORMATION OF PUBLIC OPINION
Mass media effects
• The formation of public opinion starts
with agenda setting by major media outlets
throughout the world.
• This agenda setting dictates what is newsworthy
and how and when it will be reported.
• The media agenda is set by a variety of different
environmental and newswork factors that
determines which stories will be newsworthy.
Framing
• Another key component in the formation of public opinion
is framing.
• Framing is when a story or piece of news is portrayed in a
particular way and is meant to sway the consumers attitude
one way or the other. Most political issues are heavily
framed in order to persuade voters to vote for a particular
candidate.
• For example, if Candidate X once voted on a bill that raised
income taxes on the middle class, a framing headline would
read "Candidate X Doesn't Care About the Middle Class".
This puts Candidate X in a negative frame to the news reader.
Social desirability
• Social desirability is another key component to the formation of
public opinion.
• Social desirability is the idea that people in general will form their
opinions based on what they believe is the prevalent opinion of the
social group they identify with.
• Based on media agenda setting and media framing, most often a
particular opinion gets repeated throughout various news mediums
and social networking sites, until it creates a false vision where the
perceived truth can actually be very far away from the actual truth.
• When asked for their opinion on a subject about which they are
uninformed, people often provide pseudo-opinions they believe
will please the questioner.
Mass media effects
• Public opinion can be influenced by public
relations and the political media. Additionally, mass
media utilizes a wide variety
of advertising techniques to get their message out
and change the minds of people. Since the
1950s, television has been the main medium for
molding public opinion.
• Since the late 2000s, the Internet has become a
platform for forming public opinion. Surveys have
showed that more people get their news
Mass media effects
• from social media and news websites as
opposed to print newspapers.
• The accessibility of social media allows public
opinion to be formed by a broader range
of social movements and news sources.
Gunn Enli
• Gunn Enli identifies the Internet's effect on
public opinion as being “characterized by an
intensified personalization of political advocacy
and increased anti-elitism, popularization and
populism”.
• Public opinion has become more varied as a
result of online news sources being influenced
by political communication and agenda setting.
Role of influentials
• There have been a variety of academic studies investigating
whether or not public opinion is influenced by "influentials",
or persons that have a significant effect on influencing
opinion of the general public regarding any relevant issues.
• Many early studies have modeled the transfer of
information from mass media sources to the general public
as a "two-step" process.
• In this process, information from mass media and other far-
reaching sources of information influences influentials, and
influentials then influence the general public as opposed to
the mass media directly influencing the public.
Watts and Dodds
• While the "two-step" process regarding public opinion
influence has motivated further research on the role of
influential persons, a more recent study by Watts and
Dodds (2007) suggests that while influentials play some
role in influencing public opinion, "non-influential"
persons that make up the general public are also just as
likely (if not more likely) to influence opinion provided
that the general public is composed of persons that are
easily influenced.
• This is referred to in their work as the "Influential
Hypothesis".
