The political role of public opinion

Political scientists and historians have been most interested in the part that public opinion has played and is playing in political life. Accordingly, they have looked upon it primarily as an expression of opinion from the public that reaches the government and that the government finds prudent to heed (Speier 1950; Key 1961, p. 14). Some students have added the concept of latent public opinion, that is, public opinion that governmental officials expect will form if they do or do not do something and that thus influences their actions even though it has not yet taken shape (Truman 1951, pp. 511-512). This approach may bypass such questions as how opinions are distributed and what kinds of relationships they have with each other, but it does not necessarily do so. Numerous political thinkers have been interested in the measurement and organizational structure of public opinion.

Although the term “public opinion” was not used prior to the eighteenth century, historians have identified phenomena very much like it in both ancient and medieval civilizations (Bauer 1929), and the relationship between government and mass opinion receives attention in the work of Plato, Aristotle, and other classical as well as medieval writers. Following the Protestant Reformation and the Renaissance in Europe, both of which resulted in more widespread and intensive discussion of competing beliefs and ideas, popular opinion was increasingly seen as playing a part in governmental decisions. Machiavelli believed that princes should take this opinion into account as one element in their calculations, and by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries leading political philosophers were paying tribute to its power. Rousseau held that all laws were ultimately based on public opinion and regarded the free expression of it as a major safeguard against despotism. Bentham stressed that the legislator could not ignore it (Palmer 1936).

By the nineteenth century the concept of public opinion had entered into the mainstream of political theory. In Europe it was frequently seen as a weapon of the middle class against the old order. Friedrich J. Stahl, a Prussian conservative, described public opinion as the “will of the middle class” and believed that with the aid of the press the middle class would prevail over the crown. Johann Kaspar Bluntschli, the Swiss legal scholar, wrote that public opinion was “predominantly the opinion of the middle classes, which form their own judgments and express these in unison” (Lenz 1956, p. 60). James Bryce saw public opinion in western Europe as being substantially the opinion of the class that “wears black coats and lives in good houses” (1888, p. 260 in 1891 edition). Observers of the United States held that public opinion there rested on a far wider population base. Bryce, writing in the 1880s, described the American system as government by public opinion and believed that popular attitudes were expressed primarily by the press, political parties, and elections. Half a century earlier Tocqueville had likewise considered the mass basis of American public opinion, and he saw in its influence a threat to independence of thought: “In America, the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion” (1835, p. 117 in 1956 edition); “I am not the more disposed to pass beneath the yoke because it is held out to me by the arms of a million of men” (ibid., p. 149).

The current concerns of those who are primarily interested in the interplay between public opinion and government center on questions defined in the previous century, but the discussion of these questions customarily draws upon quantitative data from opinion polls, content analyses, or other sources. A large portion of this literature consists of arranging and analyzing poll data in order to disclose the content and characteristics of opinions with which governments are or should be concerned (Key 1961). Thus, one can find a substantial number of studies that deal with public opinion and foreign policy, public opinion and social legislation, or public opinion and economic issues. Many of these studies focus on population subgroups of presumed political significance.

Closely related to analyses of public opinion on political issues are studies that are concerned with the ways in which public opinion influences government. In addition to using poll data, these studies usually describe the activities of pressure groups and political parties and the techniques of individuals who attempt to affect government policy (for a selective bibliography, see Childs 1965, pp. 257-260). Included in this group are analyses of mail reaching executive or legislative officials. Although most such treatments have dealt with the United States, there is a growing body of literature both on pressure groups in other countries and on efforts by individuals in other countries to participate in official decisions. A recent study compared citizens’ attitudes toward their own ability to influence governmental policy in West Germany, Italy, Mexico, and the United States (Almond & Verba 1963).

The weakness of most studies dealing with the influence of public opinion on government policy is that they cannot trace the effectiveness of the attempts that are made to exert influence. The equation of activity with effectiveness is simply assumed. Nevertheless, there are some notable exceptions. For example, the West Coast fishing industry was found to play a major part in the negotiation of a settlement with Japan following World War II (Cohen 1957).

The other side of the coin—government efforts to influence public opinion—has also been dealt with extensively. Tools most frequently used by governments for this purpose include publicity, propaganda, censorship, and a number of techniques of news management (Childs 1965, pp. 305-308). Although the manipulative attempts of government in the United States have received the lion’s share of the attention of scholars, the rulers of totalitarian states have been most active in trying to mold public opinion. Efforts of the Nazi government to control public attitudes in Germany were notorious, and Soviet domestic propaganda has also received fairly extensive attention (Inkeles 1950). More recently, scholars have begun to focus on the activities of Communist China in this field (Yu 1964). As with studies of popular efforts to influence governments, treatments of governmental efforts to manipulate opinion have ordinarily been unable to show a clear connection between cause and effect. A possible exception is the case of the Soviet Union, where even anticommunist citizens appear to have adopted many of the principal categories of thought prescribed for them by the government.

Cutting across all these aspects of the 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. Since voting is the method by which the largest numbers of citizens of any democracy participate in policy, analysis of the behavior of potential voters during and between election campaigns contributes fundamentally to an understanding of the democratic process. Those who believe in democracy often find the results of such studies discouraging, in that they may show widespread prejudice and ignorance or little popular appreciation of important issues, but the results are rarely irrelevant.

To generalize about the effects of the enormous amount of theorizing, philosophizing, and research that has been done on the relationship between public opinion and government is a difficult task. It seems safe to assume that the behavior of some political leaders has been influenced by political theories that are based in part on thinking about public opinion. It can also be argued that public-opinion research has enhanced the prospects for democratic government by helping to acquaint major groups in the population with each other’s attitudes and values. When, however, one looks for specific examples of ways in which the study of public opinion has affected the political process, the examples one finds are likely to be relatively minor and to involve measurement rather than theory. For instance, officials have sometimes been able to discount the importance of what they hear from pressure groups when they have learned about the distribution of the opinions of the population as a whole on the same issues. It is also probable that both governmental manipulators of public opinion and private groups seeking to influence official policy have been able to conduct their activities with greater sophistication because of increased knowledge about the nature of the relationship between the government and the public.