Theories of political opinion

The range of individual and group opinions taken into account by political rulers, representatives, and public officials varies widely among political societies, historical and contemporary. In primitive communities and in feudal, caste, or closed-class social systems, the range of political communication seems to have been narrowly confined within limits set by ritual, custom, and social structure. In fractionalized, transitional cultures the ruling group often restricts sharply the scope and subjects of public discussion and indeed controls more or less completely the channels of mass communication. Since World War i it has become fashionable for all governments to claim to be democratic, in the sense that a high degree of correspondence is imputed to exist between the acts of government officials and the majority opinion. However, we may draw a preliminary, fundamental distinction between “constitutional” and “people’s” democracies, in terms of the degree of nongovernmental control of the instruments of opinion formation and the relation that is asserted to exist between public opinion and governmental decision making.

Under constitutional governments, public officials operate through prescribed, legal procedures for issuing and validating statements of public policy. Nongovernmental institutions of public information and discussion are allowed ample opportunity, before, during, and after the official process, to formulate the issues and to develop a patterned distribution of individual responses from “the country.” All this goes on in an atmosphere free from military or private violence, and individuals and groups are free to criticize and respond to governmental programs of information and persuasion. In this context the acts of public officials are interpreted as symbolic, authoritative expressions of the public interest, legally enforceable until amended or rescinded by proper constitutional procedures after a period of public reaction, political agitation, and response.

Contrariwise, in so-called people’s democracies it is held that the will of the “people,” the “masses,” the “nation,” or the Volk is known or available only to the ruler or the party; this “will” is embodied in the ruler’s or the party’s acts, and only such information and views as are found necessary or appropriate are legitimate matters for public knowledge and discussion. To this end, the channels of public communication and conditions of group association are rigorously limited and controlled by governmental and party officials.

Speculative theories of political opinion can be grouped into five classes; each has affinities to one of the two basic types above but may also resemble the other in some features.

Elitist theories

Perhaps the oldest theory of political opinion is that of the elite, or ruling class, according to which society is horizontally divided into leaders and followers and vertically divided into hierarchies of racial, functional, socioeconomic, or demographic groups. The ruling class is composed of the leaders of the several vertical-group hierarchies. The consensual foundations of political community, according to elitist theorists, lie in ethnic ties, qualities of the people, ancient customs, glorious historical events, and symbolic documents embodying self-limiting agreements between the nominal ruler and the elite leaders. In the elitist conception of political opinion, the status and opinion leaders outside government are seen as occupying a hierarchical position above the points of official decision, so that the lower-status governmental officials, by definition, simply execute the decisions made by the ruling class. Representative of this approach is the work of Gaetano Mosca [SeeMosca].