Reading Public Opinion

Public opinion is one of the most elusive and complex concepts in democratic theory, and we do not fully understand its role in the political process. Reading Public Opinion offers one provocative approach for understanding how public opinion fits into the empirical world of politics. In fact, Susan Herbst finds that public opinion, surprisingly, has little to do with the mass public in many instances. Herbst draws on ideas from political science, sociology, and psychology to explore how three sets of political participants—legislative staffers, political activists, and journalists—actually evaluate and assess public opinion. She concludes that many political actors reject "the voice of the people" as uninformed and nebulous, relying instead on interest groups and the media for representations of public opinion. Her important and original book forces us to rethink our assumptions about the meaning and place of public opinion in the realm of contemporary democratic politics.

Across the Muslim world, religion plays an increasingly prominent role in both the private and public lives of over a billion people. Observers of these changes struggle to understand the consequences of an Islamic resurgence in a democratizing world. Will democratic political participation by an increasingly religious population lead to victories by Islamists at the ballot box? Will more conspicuously pious Muslims participate in politics and markets in a fundamentally different way than they had previously? Will a renewed attention to Islam lead Muslim democracies to reevaluate their place in the global community of states, turning away from alignments with the West or the Global South and towards an Islamic civilizational identity? The answers to all of these questions depend, at least in part, on what ordinary Muslims think and do. In order to provide these answers, the authors of this book look to Indonesia--the world's largest Muslim country and one of the world's only consolidated Muslim democracies. They draw on original public opinion data to explore how religiosity and religious belief translate into political and economic behavior at the individual level. Across various issue areas--support for democracy or Islamic law, partisan politics, Islamic finance, views about foreign engagement--they find no evidence that the religious orientations of Indonesian Muslims have any systematic relationships with their political preferences or economic behavior. The broad conclusion is that scholars of Islam, in Indonesia and elsewhere, must understand religious life and individual piety as part of a larger and more complex set of social transformations. These transformations include modernization, economic development, and globalization, each of which has occurred in parallel with Islamic revivalism throughout the world. Against the common assumption that piety would naturally inhibit any tendencies towards modernity, democracy, or cosmopolitanism, Piety and Public Opinion reveals the complex and subtle links between religion and political beliefs in a critically important Muslim democracy.

What is perhaps most amazing about this little book is its comprehensiveness. In little more than a 100 pages, Price manages to discuss the relevance of ′public opinion′ to just about every major mass communication theory. . . . The reference list alone would be a valuable resource for anyone studying public opinion. . . . Price does a stellar job of explaining in easy-to-understand language what most of these references have to say about public opinion. . . . The two greatest contributions of the book are Price′s organization of the vast literature on public opinion, coupled with his distillation of major works, including some truly hefty tomes, into a few simple words. Those who have grappled with the thoughts of Habermas and Blumer, for example, will greatly appreciate Price′s succinct and insightful descriptions of the relevance of these difficult works to the study of public opinion. Another strong point is the book′s currency: while you will find references to works published in the 1920s, you also will find books, articles, and reports published in the 1990s. . . . If you are new to the study of public opinion and communication, this book is the most painless, yet valuable introduction I can recommend. If you think you already know a lot about public opinion, the book may be even more valuable: it may dispel you of the notion that anyone knows a lot about public opinion." --Journalism Quarterly Public opinion--is it a simple aggregation of individual views, or instead some kind of collective-level, emergent product of debate and discussion? What is the role of public opinion in popular government? How do the mass media shape public opinion, or link it to governmental decision-making? Price′s Public Opinion explores such questions by tracing the historical development and application of the concept of public opinion. It examines the concept′s origins in Enlightenment thought and follows its evolution as a tool for social-scientific research. Intended as a map of the sprawling research terrain, Public Opinion introduces the conceptual mechanisms underlying public opinion research and shows how these concepts are used in an attempt to resolve enduring theoretical, normative, and practical questions. Because public opinion is one of the most vital and enduring concepts in the social sciences, this book will enjoy wide application in psychology, sociology, political science, journalism, and communication research in both academic and applied settings.

READING PUBLIC OPINION offers a provocative approach for understanding how public opinion fits into the empirical world of politics. Scholar Susan Herbst reveals that how public opinion is actually assessed has little to do with the mass public. Her original and important book forces us to rethink our assumptions about the place of public opinion in contemporary politics.

This book presents a comprehensive examination of public opinion in the democratic world. Built around chapters that highlight key explanatory frameworks used in understanding public opinion, the book presents a coherent study of the subject in a comparative perspective, emphasizing and interrogating immigration as a key issue of high concern to most mass publics in the democratic world. Key features of the book include: Covers several theoretical issues and determinants of opinion such as the effects of personality, age and life cycle, ideology, social class, partisanship, gender, religion, ethnicity, language, and media, highlighting over time the effects of political, social, and economic contexts. Each chapter explores the theoretical rationale, mechanisms of effect, and use in the scholarly literature on public opinion before applying these to the issue of immigration comparatively and in specific places or regions. Widely comparative using a nine-country sample (Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America) in the analysis of individual-level determinants of public opinion about immigration and extending to other countries like Belgium, Brazil, and Japan when evaluating contextual factors. This edited volume will be essential reading for students, scholars, and practitioners interested in public opinion, political behaviour, voting behaviour, politics of the media, immigration, political communication, and, more generally, democracy and comparative politics.

The book "Public Opinion" is a critical assessment of functional democratic government, especially of the irrational and often self-serving social perceptions that influence individual behavior and prevent optimal societal cohesion. The detailed descriptions of the cognitive limitations people face in comprehending their socio-political and cultural environments leading them to apply an evolving catalogue of general stereotypes to a complex reality, rendered Public Opinion a seminal text in the fields of media studies, political science, and social psychology. Walter Lippmann was an American writer, reporter, and political commentator famous for being among the first to introduce the concept of Cold War, coining the term "stereotype" in the modern psychological meaning, and critiquing media and democracy in his newspaper column and several books.

In writing this book I have tried to set down the board principles that govern the profession of public relations. It is certain that the power of public opinion is constantly increasing and will keep on increasing. It is equally certain that it is more and more being influenced, changed, stirred by impulses from below. The danger which this development contains for a progressive ennobling of human society and a progressive heightening of human culture is apparent. The duty of the higher strata of society-the cultivated, the learned, the expert, the intellectual-is therefore clear. They must inject moral and spiritual motives into public opinion. Public opinion must become public conscience.

Examining a central assumption widely accepted as being crucial in making democracy work - that politicians form a more or less accurate image of public opinion and take that perception into account when representing citizens - Politicians' Reading of Public Opinion and its Biases presents a paradox of representation. On the one hand, politicians invest enormously in reading public opinion. They are committed to finding out what the people want and public opinion is a key consideration in many of their undertakings. Yet, on the other hand, politicians' perceptions of public opinion are surprisingly inaccurate. Politicians are hardly better at estimating public opinion than ordinary citizens are. Their perceptions are distorted by social projection, in the sense that politicians' own opinion affects their estimations, and on top of that, there seems to be a systematic right-wing bias in these perceptions. The findings imply that one of the main paths to responsive policy-making is flawed. Even though politicians do the best they can to learn about people's preferences, skewed perceptions put them on the wrong track. From a democratic perspective, the central findings of the book are quite sobering. The high hopes that many authors had with regard to politicians' ability to adequately 'consult' or 'sense' public opinion appear to be vain. The book puts forward a plausible driver of the slippage between the public and politics. Politicians are less responsive to people's preferences than they could be, not because they do not want to be responsive but because they base themselves on erroneous public opinion perceptions.