Public opinion and government

By its very nature, the democratic process spurs citizens to form opinions on a number of issues. Voters are called upon to choose candidates in elections, to consider constitutional amendments, and to approve or reject municipal taxes and other legislative proposals. Almost any matter on which the executive or legislature has to decide may become a public issue if a significant number of people wish to make it one. The political attitudes of these persons are often stimulated or reinforced by outside agencies—a crusading newspaper, an interest group, or a government agency or official.

The English philosopher and economist Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) saw the greatest difficulty of the legislator as being “in conciliating the public opinion, in correcting it when erroneous, and in giving it that bent which shall be most favourable to produce obedience to his mandates.” At the same time, Bentham and some other thinkers believed that public opinion is a useful check on the authority of rulers. Bentham demanded that all official acts be publicized, so that an enlightened public opinion could pass judgment on them, as would a tribunal: “To the pernicious exercise of the power of government it is the only check.”

In the early years of modern democracy, some scholars acknowledged the power of public opinion but warned that it could be a dangerous force. Tocqueville was concerned that a government of the masses would become a “tyranny of the majority.” But, whether public opinion is regarded as a constructive or a baneful force in a democracy, there are few politicians who are prepared to suggest in public that government should ignore it.

Political scientists have been less concerned with what part public opinion should play in a democratic polity and have given more attention to establishing what part it does play in actuality. From the examination of numerous histories of policy formation, it is clear that no sweeping generalization can be made that will hold in all cases. The role of public opinion varies from issue to issue, just as public opinion asserts itself differently from one democracy to another. Perhaps the safest generalization that can be made is that public opinion does not influence the details of most government policies but it does set limits within which policy makers must operate. That is, public officials will usually seek to satisfy a widespread demand—or at least take it into account in their deliberations—and they will usually try to avoid decisions that they believe will be widely unpopular.

Yet efforts by political leaders to accommodate government policies to public opinion are not always perceived as legitimate; indeed, journalists and political commentators have often characterized them as pandering to public opinion to curry favour with their constituents or as being driven by the latest poll results. Such charges were questioned, however, by public opinion scholars Lawrence R. Jacobs and Robert Y. Shapiro, who argued in Politicians Don’t Pander: Political Manipulation and the Loss of Democratic Responsiveness (2000) that politicians do not actually do this. They found instead that by the early 1970s the accusation of pandering was being used deliberately by prominent journalists, politicians, and other elites as a means of lessening the influence of public opinion on government policy. This practice, they theorized, might have resulted from long-standing suspicion or hostility among elites toward popular participation in government and politics. In keeping with their findings, Jacobs and Shapiro postulated the eventual disappearance from public discourse of the stigmatizing term pandering and its replacement by the more neutral term political responsiveness.

Although they rejected the charge of pandering, Jacobs and Shapiro also asserted that most politicians tend to respond to public opinion in cynical ways; most of them, for example, use public opinion research not to establish their policies but only to identify slogans and symbols that will make predetermined policies more appealing to their constituents. According to Jacobs and Shapiro, most public opinion research is used to manipulate the public rather than to act on its wishes.

Public opinion exerts a more powerful influence in politics through its “latent” aspects. As discussed by V.O. Key, latent public opinion is, in effect, a probable future reaction by the public to a current decision or action by a public official or a government. Politicians who ignore the possible consequences of latent public opinion risk setback or defeat in future elections. Government leaders who take latent public opinion into account, on the other hand, may be willing to undertake an unpopular action that has a negative effect on public opinion in the near term, provided that the action is also likely to have a significant positive effect at a later and more important time.

Public opinion seems to be much more effective in influencing policy making at the local level than at the state or national levels. One reason for this is that issues of concern to local governments—such as the condition of roads, schools, and hospitals—are less complex than those dealt with by governments at higher levels; another is that at the local level there are fewer institutional or bureaucratic barriers between policy makers and voters. Representative government itself, however, tends to limit the power of public opinion to influence specific government decisions, since ordinarily the only choice the public is given is that of approving or disapproving the election of a given official.

Public opinion polling

Public opinion polling can provide a fairly exact analysis of the distribution of opinions on almost any issue within a given population. Assuming that the proper questions are asked, polling can reveal something about the intensity with which opinions are held, the reasons for these opinions, and the probability that the issues have been discussed with others. Polling can occasionally reveal whether the people holding an opinion can be thought of as constituting a cohesive group. However, survey findings do not provide much information about the opinion leaders who may have played an important part in developing the opinion (although this information may be obtained through subgroup analysis, provided that the original sample is large enough to ensure that reports of opinion leaders are statistically reliable to a reasonable degree).

Polls are good tools for measuring “what” or “how much.” Finding out “how” or “why,” however, is the principal function of qualitative research—including especially the use of focus groups—which involves observing interactions between a limited number of people rather than posing a series of questions to an individual in an in-depth interview. However, polls cannot identify the likely future actions of the public in general, nor can they predict the future behaviour of individuals. They are also inappropriate as tools for exploring concepts unfamiliar to respondents. One of the best predictors of how people will vote is, simply, the vote that they cast in the last election. This is especially true if they automatically vote for the same political party, say they strongly support that party, and state that they are certain that they will vote.

Polls may serve a variety of purposes. Those reported in the mass media, for example, may be used to inform, to entertain, or to educate. In an election, well-run polls may constitute one of the most systematic and objective sources of political information. They are also the means by which journalists, politicians, business leaders, and other elites—whether they admit it or not—learn what the general public is thinking (other sources include casual encounters with ordinary citizens, receiving online petitions, listening to callers on radio talk shows, and reading letters from concerned citizens). Other things being equal, leaders who pay attention to public opinion will be better able to understand the groups they are trying to influence and better equipped to communicate overall.

Ideally, the people who prepare surveys and carry them out have no mission other than the objective and systematic measurement of public opinion. It is nonetheless possible for bias to enter into the polling process at any point, especially in cases where the entity commissioning the poll has a financial or political interest in the result or wishes to use the result to promote a specific agenda. Polls have been skewed from the outset by news companies surveying public opinion on political issues, by manufacturing firms engaged in market research, by interest groups seeking to popularize their views, and even by academic scholars wishing to inform or influence public discourse about some significant social or scientific issue. The results of such potentially biased surveys are frequently released to the mass media in order to magnify their impact, a practice known as advocacy polling. (See below Nonscientific polling.)