Public Opinion

Public Opinion. Since democratic theory requires leaders to respect “the will of the people” in directing the affairs of the nation, public opinion holds an exhalted place in democracies like the United States. It was an essential concept in Enlightenment political thought, and social observers from Alexis de Tocqueville to Walter Lippmann (Public Opinion, 1922; The Phantom Public, 1925) have noted its importance in America. Most philosophers and scholars writing about public opinion in the United States agree on its role: It embodies the consent of the governed and confers legitimacy on the government. Americans have expressed their opinions on policy issues and political actions, while leaders have sought to know the popular will. Scholars have had a harder time agreeing on a definition of public opinion. However, with both the terms “public” (or “the public”) and “opinion” stirring debate. Contemporary scholars appear to be comfortable defining public opinion as “the aggregated views of large numbers of people in a society on issues central to how that society functions.”

Methods for determining “public opinion” have varied throughout American history. The most basic of these has been an electoral one: popular referenda on public issues, proposed laws, and enactment of (or changes to) constitutions. Tens of thousands of these have been conducted from the eighteenth century to the present. In the late twentieth century, between two hundred and three hundred referenda were typically voted upon in each election year. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, less formal means were also employed, including the use of informed observers (notables, public figures, ward heelers in urban political machines), “straw polls” dating from as early as the 1820s, through the first systematic opinion surveys beginning in the late nineteenth century. Though these forms of collecting information on public opinion were reported widely in the press and avidly consumed by an increasingly literate and engaged mass readership, historians generally agree that they were not very accurate and were subject to reporting bias.

In the 1930s and 1940s, scientific polling and the use of probability samples improved methods for collecting information on the public's opinion. Notable in this era were George Gallup's founding of the influential American Institute of Public Opinion (Gallup Poll) in 1935 and the establishment of such university‐based survey organizations as the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago and the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan. As regular polls and somewhat more scientific nationwide surveys proliferated, these investigations of the public's “opinion” more accurately reflected society as a whole. Topics expanded from electoral and policy‐related issues to include social problems and individuals' consumer tastes, radio and television preferences, and economic behavior. By the end of the twentieth century, the mass media had joined commercial and university‐based survey organizations in constantly monitoring (and reporting) public attitudes. Despite ever‐present concerns over the ways of manipulating public opinion (including advertising and propaganda), the appetite of both decision‐makers and the general citizenry for information on what the public “thinks” appeared undiminished.
See also Democracy in America.

Bibliography

Jean M. Converse , Survey Research in the United States: Roots and Emergence, 1890–1960, 1987.
Susan Herbst , Numbered Voices: How Opinion Polling Has Shaped American Politics, 1993.

Erik W. Austin