PUBLIC OPINION

an aggregate of the individual views, attitudes, and beliefs about a particular topic as expressed by a significant proportion of a community. There is little agreement among political scientists, sociologists, and social psychologists regarding the nature of public opinion. The term has been loosely used to denote the firmly settled convictions of a group; to denote the process of developing opinions, as distinguished from the product; or to denote statements that are the result of a process of logical reasoning as contrasted with those arrived at by illogical means. Nineteenth-century commentators stressed the rationality of the opinion process; those of the 20th century do not. In 1828 W.A. Mackinnon declared, Public opinion may be said to be that sentiment on any given subject which is entertained by the best informed, most intelligent, and most moral persons in the community, which is gradually spread and adopted by nearly all persons of any education or proper feeling in a civilized state. Later, A. Lawrence Lowell wrote, An opinion may be defined as the acceptance of one among two or more inconsistent views which are capable of being accepted by the rational mind as true. After 1900 the developing science of social psychology increasingly emphasized nonrational factors involved in the opinion process; and the manipulative techniques of the practitioners of publicity, advertising, and propaganda further eroded faith in rationality. Political democracy, however, holds to the principle that the opinions of some persons are based on reason and that it is possible to bring popular judgments to positions that are rationally defensible. According to one definition, relatively stable beliefs should not be considered a part of the opinion process. A state of agreement following an opinion controversy is referred to as a consensus. There is consensus of the type that Montesquieu designated the esprit gnral, that Jean-Jacques Rousseau spoke of as the volont gnrale, and that the English theorists called public will. Wilhelm Bauer wrote of organic opinion as the relatively fixed views as distinguished from transient opinions. But one may consider that public opinion deals with those topics which are controversial and discussable and not with those on which opinions are firmly fixed. an aggregate of the individual views, attitudes, and beliefs about a particular topic, expressed by a significant proportion of a community. Additional reading General texts include Norman J. Powell, Anatomy of Public Opinion (1951); William Albig, Modern Public Opinion (1956); Robert E. Lane and David O. Sears, Public Opinion (1964); Harwood L. Childs, Public Opinion (1965); Leonard W. Doob, Public Opinion and Propaganda, 2nd ed. (1966); and Bernard Hennessey, Public Opinion, 5th ed. (1985). Classic treatments of public opinion include James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, vol. 2 (1888); Albert V. Dicey, Lectures on the Relation Between Law & Public Opinion in England During the Nineteenth Century , 2nd ed. (1914, reissued 1985); Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (1922, reprinted 1991); A. Lawrence Lowell, Public Opinion and Popular Government, new ed. (1926, reprinted 1969); Reo Millard Christenson and Robert Owen McWilliams (compilers), Voice of the People, 2nd ed. (1967); and Morris Janowitz and Paul M. Hirsch (eds.), Reader in Public Opinion and Mass Communication, 3rd ed. (1981).The history of public opinion is traced in the appropriate articles in the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 12 (1934, reissued 1967); and the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 13 (1968); and in P.A. Palmer, The Concept of Public Opinion in Political Theory, in Essays in History and Political Theory in Honor of Charles Howard McIlwain (1936, reissued 1967); Hans Speier, Historical Development of Public Opinion, American Journal of Sociology, 55:376388 (January 1950); Harold D. Lasswell, Daniel Lerner, and Hans Speier (eds.), Propaganda and Communication in World History, 3 vol. (1979); and Vincent Price, Public Opinion (1992).The development of public opinion polling, academic survey research, and survey research for government is explored in Martin Bulmer (ed.), Essays on the History of British Sociological Research (1985); Jean M. Converse, Survey Research in the United States: Roots and Emergence, 18901960 (1987); and Herbert H. Hyman, Taking Society's Measure (1991). Journals devoted to the study of polled opinion include Public Opinion Quarterly; and International Journal of Public Opinion Research (quarterly).Defenses of the polling process by eminent practitioners, albeit with suggestions about how the polls might be improved, are found in George Gallup and Saul Forbes Rae, The Pulse of Democracy (1940, reissued 1968); George Gallup, A Guide to Public Opinion Polls, 2nd ed. (1948); Frank Teer and James D. Spence, Political Opinion Polls (1973); John Clemens, Polls, Politics, and Populism (1983); Robert M. Worcester (ed.), Political Opinion Polling: An International Review (1983); Leo Bogart, Polls and the Awareness of Public Opinion, 2nd ed. (1988); Robert M. Worcester, British Public Opinion (1991); Albert H. Cantril, The Opinion Connection (1991); and Daniel Yankelovich, Coming to Public Judgment (1991).Academic critics include Lindsay Rogers, The Pollsters (1949); Michael Wheeler, Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics (1976); Catherine Marsh, Opinion PollsSocial Science or Political Manoeuvre?, in John Irvine, Ian Miles, and Jeff Evans (eds.), Demystifying Social Statistics (1979), pp. 268288; Robert B. Westbrook, Politics as Consumption: Managing the Modern American Election, in Richard Wightman Fox and T.J. Jackson Lears (eds.), The Culture of Consumption (1983), pp. 143173; and Benjamin Ginsberg, The Captive Public (1986). Russell J. Dalton, Citizen Politics in Western Democracies: Public Opinion and Political Parties in the United States, Great Britain, West Germany, and France (1988), offers an excellent comparative study of the impact of public opinion on Western political parties.The most innovative and significant works using poll data are V.O. Key, Jr., Public Opinion and American Democracy (1961); Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles Among Western Publics (1977); Robert Cameron Mitchell and Richard T. Carson, Using Surveys to Value Public Goods: The Contingent Valuation Method (1989), on determining the public's willingness to pay for public goods; Paul M. Sniderman et al., Reasoning and Choice: Explorations in Political Psychology (1991); and John R. Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (1992), both on the processes of reasoning that can be discerned when people are confronted with choices about political issues; Shanto Iyengar and Donald R. Kinder, News That Matters (1987), on how television news primes voters; Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion, Our Social Skin, 2nd ed. (1993; originally published in German, 1980), which tries to show how perceptions of public opinion themselves shape what individuals say and do; Paul M. Sniderman and Thomas Piazza, The Scar of Race (1993), which uses computer-assisted interviews to show how readily people can be talked out of the positions they have taken and why; and, on policy-making at the legislative and executive levels, Thomas R. Marshall, Public Opinion and the Supreme Court (1989); and Lawrence R. Jacobs, The Health of Nations: Public Opinion and the Making of American and British Health Policy (1993).The continuing problem of rationality is the focus of V.O. Key, Jr., The Responsible Electorate: Rationality in Presidential Voting, 19361960 (1966); Benjamin I. Page, Choices and Echoes in Presidential Elections: Rational Man and Electoral Democracy (1978); and Benjamin I. Page and Robert Y. Shapiro, The Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends in Americans' Policy Preferences (1992).Qualitative studies based on intensive open-ended interviews with small numbers of people, which provide an important counterpoint to the portraits derived from survey research, include David Riesman, Faces in the Crowd: Individual Studies in Character and Politics (1952, reprinted 1979); M. Brewster Smith, Jerome S. Bruner, and Robert W. White, Opinions and Personality (1956); Robert Edwards Lane, Political Ideology: Why the American Common Man Believes What He Does (1962); R.W. Connell, The Child's Construction of Politics (1971); Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class (1972, reissued 1993); Craig Reinarman, American States of Mind: Political Beliefs and Behavior Among Private and Public Workers (1987); and William A. Gamson, Talking Politics (1992).Principal studies of American elections, which reveal a great deal about public opinion, include Bernard Berelson, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, and William N. McPhee, Voting (1954, reprinted 1986); Angus Campbell, Gerald Gurin, and Warren E. Miller, The Voter Decides (1954, reprinted 1971); Angus Campbell et al., The American Voter (1960, reprinted 1980); Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet, The People's Choice, 3rd ed. (1968); Harold Mendelsohn and Garrett J. O'keefe, The People Choose a President: Influences on Voter Decision Making (1976); Norman H. Nie, Sidney Verba, and John R. Petrocik, The Changing American Voter, enlarged ed. (1979); Thomas E. Patterson, The Mass Media Election: How Americans Choose Their President (1980); Eric R.A.N. Smith, The Unchanging American Voter (1989); and Martin P. Wattenberg, The Rise of Candidate-Centered Politics (1991). Diffusion of information and opinion leadership is discussed in Elihu Katz and Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Personal Influence (1955, reissued 1965); but compare Todd Gitlin, Media Sociology: The Dominant Paradigm, Theory and Society, 6(2):205253 (September 1978), a devastating critique. An examination of the formation of American public opinion is found in Paul R. Abramson, Political Attitudes in America: Formation and Change (1983); and Robert S. Erikson, Norman R. Luttbeg, and Kent L. Tedin, American Public Opinion: Its Origins, Content, and Impact, 5th ed. (1995).Excellent expositions of the sampling method are Frederick F. Stephan and Phillip J. McCarthy, Sampling Opinions (1958, reprinted 1974); Morris H. Hansen, William N. Hurwitz, and William G. Madow, Sample Survey Methods and Theory, 2 vol. (1953); and Leslie Kish, Survey Sampling (1965). Detailed treatments of the conduct of surveys and key methodological issues can be found in Herbert H. Hyman et al., Interviewing in Social Research (1954, reissued 1975); Herbert H. Hyman, Survey Design and Analysis (1955); William A. Belson, The Design and Understanding of Survey Questions (1981); Howard Schuman and Stanley Presser, Questions and Answers in Attitude Surveys: Experiments on Question Form, Wording, and Context (1981); Charles F. Turner and Elizabeth Martin (eds.), Surveying Subjective Phenomena, 2 vol. (1984); and D.A. de Vaus, Surveys in Social Research, 3rd ed. (1991). Norman M. Bradburn and Seymour Sudman, Polls & Surveys: Understanding What They Tell Us (1988), offers a good introduction to the interpretation of survey results. W. Phillips Davison The Editors of the Encyclopdia Britannica