Future prospects

Although there is little agreement on a precise definition of “public opinion,” and many of its facets remain hazy, constantly increasing use of the term during the past two centuries testifies to its utility. As societies have become more complicated and ever larger masses of people have become involved in political and economic life, students have felt a growing need for some concept that refers to collectivities failing between the undifferentiated mass, on the one hand, and primary groups and formal organizations, on the other. In modern society people do not behave like isolated individuals, but neither can their behavior be explained exclusively in terms of their organizational and group membership. This became abundantly apparent just prior to and during the French Revolution, when the middle class began acting much as though it were an organized force, even though no principle of organization was immediately apparent. True, the middle class had its salons and coffeehouses, where information and ideas were exchanged, and sometimes its newspapers, but were these communication facilities alone sufficient to threaten the stability of the ancien regime“? The ferment of the times could be explained only in terms of some greater force, and this force was labeled public opinion.

As a result of increases in literacy and proliferation of communication media, public opinion soon ceased to be exclusively a middle-class phenomenon in the principal industrialized areas of the world. Less-advantaged members of the community have also been able to achieve a consensus on some issues, although less frequently and intensely than those at higher socioeconomic levels. The civil rights movement in the United States has succeeded in mobilizing public opinion far beyond the middle class. It is probable that public opinion in the developing countries will evolve in similar fashion but will take less time to do so.

Public opinion has played a smaller role in communist countries than in the democracies. The efforts of the state to control the principal channels of public communication and to prevent nonoffi-cial links among the citizenry have made it more difficult for individual opinions to become related and for consensuses to develop. Nevertheless, this has occurred in some instances, either because independent-minded artists and writers have given expression to widely shared ideas or because it has been made possible by word-of-mouth communication. Both rebellious writers and interpersonal channels seem to have played a role in the growth of public opinion that led to the antiregime uprising in Hungary in 1956. Communist spokesmen occasionally assert that public opinion does exist in countries having a totalitarian-socialist form of government but that it is a common opinion in which the entire population shares and is adequately expressed in single-list elections and mass demonstrations. It is improbable that such asseverations are made seriously, especially since public-opinion studies that recognize important differences among individuals and population groups have been reported from eastern Europe and the Soviet Union with increasing frequency.

Our understanding of the role that public opinion plays in political, economic, cultural, and other areas can be expected to increase during the coming years as research and thinking at all levels is pursued throughout the world. Further comparisons of public-opinion processes in various societies would be especially helpful. Even more important would be empirical and theoretical studies linking together the four approaches described above, so that each would contribute to an interlocking and mutually reinforcing whole. Only when this integration has been achieved will a coherent theory of public opinion be possible.

W. Phillips Davison

[See alsoAttitudes; Census; Communication, Mass;Communication, Political; Diffusion, article on

INTERPERSONAL INFLUENCE; Mass Society; Propaganda; Public Relations; Reference Groups; and the biographies of Bryce; Cooley; Dicey; Machiavelli; Tocqueville].