What is the best description of public opinion?

Abstract

This chapter provides several resources that provide public opinion from developing countries. The Globalbarometer Surveys projects provide the results of public opinion survey waves from the regions of Africa, Asia, the Arab States, and Latin America. These surveys cover a variety of topics including governance, perceptions of the economy, and trust in institutions from respondents in dozens of countries overall. The Pew Research Center conducts a Global Attitudes Survey comprised on hundreds of thousands of international respondents on their opinions of the United States, China, and the economy among other topics. Finally, the World Values Survey conducts very thorough surveys of people’s values, ethics, opinions of others, and governance among hundreds of other topics.

Abstract

Public opinion is a contested concept. The nature of the ‘public,’ the political concepts and values that constitute ‘opinion,’ and the process whereby public opinion is formed are all matters of debate. In the dominant view, the public is a composite of individual citizens and opinion consists of the beliefs that are subjectively associated with an attitude object. The process of public opinion formation therefore revolves around individuals. Empirical research adopting this view focuses on information processing and thus examines the role of perception, reasoning, and memory on attitude formation. The conclusion is that people generally do not attend to, understand, or care about politics. What attitudes they express are typically unstable, inconsistent with one another, and do not reflect any overarching ideological point of view. Public opinion formation is also understood from three other perspectives. The first retains a psychological focus but takes a more holistic view of political meaning and examines qualitative differences in how individuals represent, understand, and judge experience and information. The second shifts the focus from individuals to discourse and considers how political concepts and values are constructed through democratic deliberation. The third perspective views publics in holistic terms and argues that public opinion is an irreducibly collective phenomenon, one that is shaped by commensurately large-scale social forces.

Abstract

Public opinion and social attitudes are broadly defined as the expression of beliefs, ideology, and sentiment within a citizenry with regard to the conduct of human affairs. The concept of public opinion arose as a consequence of the rise of democracy, premised on the notion that government should rule with the consent of the governed. Methods for collecting and analyzing data on public opinion based on survey samples were first developed in the US and Europe and are now used in most countries throughout the world. Within the field of survey research, the scientific study of public opinion has emerged as a specialized area of research that is done by sociologists, psychologists, political scientists, and market researchers. In the late 1960s, political scientists in the US were surprised to find that very few people base their political opinions and vote choices on a coherent system of beliefs. They also found that large percentages of respondents seemed to switch their opinions when asked the same question at different points in time. This instability and apparent lack of ideological consistency poses serious challenges for the theory of government by democracy. Subsequent research has shown that most people's opinions are influenced by family socialization and education and are often based on perceptions of various social groups. Researchers also study the limitations of the methods and techniques used to measure public opinion in order to minimize biases that cause researchers to misinterpret their findings. Unlike the patterns of instability observed in individual opinions, public opinion at the aggregate level appears much more stable and consistent over time. Research on long-term trends in aggregate opinion has also shown that government does indeed respond to citizen preferences, but there is evidence to suggest that it has become more responsive (at least in the US) to the preferences of affluent citizens. Due to the globalization of the survey research industry, social scientists now have access to public opinion data from the vast majority of countries throughout the world.

1 Scope and Methods

Public opinion has been usefully defined by V. O. Key Jr. as ‘those opinions held by private persons which governments find it prudent to heed’ (Key 1961). Scholars of public opinion attempt to describe and account for the politically relevant preferences and beliefs of ordinary citizens, and to assess the political impact of those preferences and beliefs. They investigate a wide range of subject matter, including broad ideologies, specific policy preferences, evaluations of political parties and candidates, assessments of self-interest and collective interest, attributions of political responsibility, and attitudes toward social groups and political institutions (Kinder 1998).

The study of public opinion draws upon and overlaps the study of political psychology, but tends to focus on collective preferences and beliefs in their broad political context rather than on individual mental processes (see Opinion Formation). For example, the most notable work in the field begins with a psychological account of ‘how citizens acquire information and convert it into public opinion,’ but ‘pays vastly more attention to the social sources of mass attitudes—in particular, the availability of information in elite discourse—than to the largely autonomous operation of people's minds and psyches’ (Zaller 1992, p. 3).

Obviously, which opinions held by private persons governments will find it prudent to heed, depends significantly upon the political setting. It should not be surprising that systematic attention to the workings of public opinion has been most common in modern liberal democracies, where the preferences and beliefs of ordinary citizens are supposed to be broadly and routinely consequential, whether through elections of public officials, voting in referenda, interest group activities, or other mechanisms. By the same logic, the proliferation of new democracies in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Asia since the 1980s may be expected to stimulate unprecedented scholarly attention to public opinion in those parts of the world.

Contemporary studies of public opinion are profoundly shaped by insights and concerns stemming from the rise of mass politics in the nineteenth century and from the intertwined evolution of modern democratic states and societies. For example, Zaller's (1992) influential model of the dynamics of opinion change builds upon Bryce's (1888) distinction between the ‘active class’ of political entrepreneurs and the ‘passive class’ of ordinary citizens who have ‘been told what to think, and why to think it,’ and upon Lippmann's (1922) analysis of the role of the mass media and political elites (including government bureaucrats) in shaping ‘the pictures in our head’ that govern our reactions to complex and distant public affairs.

While long-standing insights and concerns are readily recognizable in modern scholarship on public opinion, empirical research in the field has been transformed since the 1940s by the development and proliferation of increasingly ambitious and sophisticated opinion surveys. Semistructured in-depth interviews, focus groups, and laboratory experiments continue to generate valuable insights, but their relatively small scale and problems of external validity make them better suited to the study of individual political psychology than of collective public sentiment. By comparison, an opinion survey with several hundred randomly selected respondents can provide a reasonably accurate representation of the preferences and beliefs of millions of ordinary citizens—public opinion on a scale which governments may well find it prudent to heed.

Scope and Methods

Public opinion has been usefully defined by V.O. Key Jr. as “those opinions held by private persons which governments find it prudent to heed” (Key, 1961). Scholars of public opinion attempt to describe and account for the politically relevant preferences and beliefs of ordinary citizens, and to assess the political impact of those preferences and beliefs. They investigate a wide range of subject matter, including broad ideologies, specific policy preferences, evaluations of political parties and candidates, assessments of self-interest and collective interest, attributions of political responsibility, and attitudes toward social groups and political institutions (Kinder, 1998).

The study of public opinion draws upon and overlaps the study of political psychology, but tends to focus on collective preferences and beliefs in their broad political context rather than on individual mental processes (see Opinion Formation, Theory of). For example, the most notable work in the field begins with a psychological account of “how citizens acquire information and convert it into public opinion,” but “pays vastly more attention to the social sources of mass attitudes – in particular, the availability of information in elite discourse – than to the largely autonomous operation of people's minds and psyches” (Zaller, 1992: p. 3).

Obviously, which opinions held by private persons governments will find it prudent to heed depends significantly upon the political setting. It should not be surprising that systematic attention to the workings of public opinion has been most common in modern liberal democracies, where the preferences and beliefs of ordinary citizens are supposed to be broadly and routinely consequential, whether through elections of public officials, voting in referenda, interest group activities, or other mechanisms. By the same logic, the proliferation of new democracies in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Asia since the 1980s may be expected to stimulate unprecedented scholarly attention to public opinion in those parts of the world.

Contemporary studies of public opinion are profoundly shaped by insights and concerns stemming from the rise of mass politics in the nineteenth century and from the intertwined evolution of modern democratic states and societies. For example, Zaller's (1992) influential model of the dynamics of opinion change builds upon Bryce's (1888) distinction between the ‘active class’ of political entrepreneurs and the ‘passive class’ of ordinary citizens who have ‘been told what to think, and why to think it,’ and upon Lippmann's (1922) analysis of the role of the mass media and political elites (including government bureaucrats) in shaping ‘the pictures in our head’ that govern our reactions to complex and distant public affairs.

While long-standing insights and concerns are readily recognizable in modern scholarship on public opinion, empirical research in the field has been transformed since the 1940s by the development and proliferation of increasingly ambitious and sophisticated opinion surveys. Semistructured in-depth interviews, focus groups, and laboratory experiments continue to generate valuable insights, but their relatively small scale and problems of external validity make them better suited to the study of individual political psychology than of collective public sentiment. By comparison, an opinion survey with several hundred randomly selected respondents can provide a reasonably accurate representation of the preferences and beliefs of millions of ordinary citizens – public opinion on a scale which governments may well find it prudent to heed.

Emerging Uses of Public Opinion Research

Public opinion analysis advanced professionally in the United States with the establishment of the journal, Public Opinion Quarterly, in 1937 and the American Association for Public Opinion Research in 1947, followed later by other associations of American and international polling organizations and researchers (see Frankovic et al., 2009). While Gallup emphasized that polling could and should make the impact of public opinion felt more broadly in government and society (Gallup and Rae, 1940; cf Herbst, 1993), the journal was founded on the premise that mass opinion had already shown its importance and what was needed was research concerned with influences on public opinion – whether through constructive education and leadership, or less benign manipulation and propaganda (see the emphasis on leadership in Key, 1961) – and methodologies for studying these opinions, including especially polling.

University-based survey research had its beginnings in 1939–40 with sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld's Office of Radio Research, later renamed the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University. This history is described by Rossi (1959), Natchez (1985), and especially Converse (1987). Lazarsfeld and his colleagues in The People's Choice (Lazarsfeld et al., 1944) did the first sophisticated survey study of presidential elections in 1940 in Erie County, Ohio. This was followed by Voting (Berelson et al., 1954), a study of the 1948 election in Elmira, New York. These early studies were highly sensitive to methodological issues in survey research and contributed to the development and use of panel surveys (the interviewing of the same respondents over two or more points in time) and complex research designs. Two of the largest and most widely known research centers that developed the capacity to do long-term national surveys are the National Opinion Research Center (NORC), which was established in 1941 at the University of Denver and moved to the University of Chicago in 1947; and the University of Michigan's Survey Research Center (SRC, at the Institute for Social Research (ISR)), established in 1946. With the publication of The Voter Decides (Campbell et al., 1954), the funding and locus for national election surveys shifted to Michigan's SRC, which led to the publication of The American Voter (Campbell et al., 1960) and the continuing series of American National Election Studies and studies based upon them (Nie et al., 1976/1979; Miller and Shanks, 1996; Lewis-Beck et al., 2008; Bafumi and Shapiro, 2009; Abramson et al., 2012).

The years from Roosevelt's election through World War II were important for professionalized polling. Roosevelt and the Democratic Party had the first recognizable political pollster/consultant Emil Hurja in their 1932, 1934, and 1936 election victories (Holli, 2002). Government commissioned survey research played a significant role in national leaders' and administrators' dealing with issues related to the World War II mobilization efforts and the economy at home; this included monitoring reactions to prices, rationing, and war bond drives, and examining labor and other war-relevant policy areas (see Sparrow, 2011). A major large-scale survey study of the military was conducted by Samuel Stouffer et al. in The American Soldier (1965[1949]), which examined army life, morale, and ultimately issues related to demobilization at end of the war. Government surveyors became leaders in academic survey research after the war, such as at Michigan's ISR/SRC.

During the war Roosevelt had the first ‘presidential pollster,’ Hadley Cantril, whose Office of Public Opinion Research provided information about public opinion related to the conducting of the war, as Roosevelt and his advisors felt the constraints of public opinion and attempted to anticipate, lead, and – arguably – manipulate it. This began with Roosevelt easing the United States into aiding the British against Nazi Germany prior to the United States entering the war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor; then his administration's efforts to gain support for giving priority to the war in Europe versus the war against Japan; through the final decision to so require unconditional surrender from both the Germans and the Japanese (see Casey, 2001). Into the postwar years and the Cold War, the State Department commissioned NORC to conduct what were ‘secret’ foreign policy surveys. Upon learning of these surveys, Congress cut off funding for them, arguing that members of Congress were the representatives of public opinion and that separate government polling had no place in representing the people (Eisinger, 2003). This did not, however, preclude the State Department's United States Information Agency from conducting surveys abroad to inform American foreign policy-making.

Conclusion

Public opinion research on legal issues has benefitted enormously from the increasing use of advanced multivariate analyses, panel surveys tracking individuals' views over time, and factorial experiments. But there are far too few cross-national studies. The bulk of the English language literature describes the views of North American and British citizens in the late twentieth century. Thus, we still know far too little about how people judge laws and legal authorities outside of common law systems in wealthy, advanced industrial nations. We do not know whether these Anglo-American views reflect fundamental psychological principles or simply the particular context in which they were expressed.

Does Public Opinion Sway Policy?

Public opinion also plays a very important role in deciding the success of policies. Although a lot of information and education is generated to warn citizens about the consequences of obesity, the general awareness and processing of this information is not all that straightforward. Oliver and Lee (2005), using very special survey data, note that most Americans are not worried about obesity. Consequently, they do not place a lot of weight on interventionist proposals, and would rather place the burden on individual responsibility. Further, Oliver and Lee (2005) also find that the American public utilizes their secondary mental framework on smoking or the environment, and extends these intuitions on issues about obesity. In the American context, such public opinion also informs the political debates, rendering policy making to combat obesity rather difficult.26

Martin et al. (2010) make a very important observation concerning the future prospects of health. They note that the vast improvements in medicine, technologies, and public policies have resulted in better health outcomes for the older population, which have continued into the 2000s. However, the younger population has seen a doubling of obesity in recent decades. The authors note that information through education about the ill-effects of smoking are slowly making inroads into public forums, and the increase in obesity has slowly started to recede.27

In fact, Hong (2013) notes that between 1980 and 2009, the health costs of overweight individuals measured by activity limitation has declined significantly. The reason for the decline is due to technical progress in the health care sector, with affordable access. Along with increases in income, the relation between BMI and activity limitation has shifted due to technical developments in the United States, resulting in the declining burden of obesity.

Non-mainstream

Some public opinions in China criticized and refuted “China Energy Threat Theory,” which is conceived to be not reasonable. They emphasize that China’s energy demand was not a threat to the oil price or world energy resource, considering China’s per capita oil consumption and her proportion of trade to the world. “China Energy Threat Theory” is a very complex issue, involving various aspects. The relatively simple and emotional criticism or rebuttal will reinforce the threatening ideas of some people.

In general, we can say that many of the arguments for “China Energy Threat” are unjustified or ill-founded. But undeniably, just like the previous analysis, no matter whether it is objective, or whether it is right or wrong, most arguments have risen for a reason. There is no denying that China’s energy demand has caused oil prices to rise or affect the stability of international energy market, and China’s economic growth has inevitably boosted the growth of energy demand and the fluctuation of the international energy market while driving the world economic growth and reducing the consumption costs of many countries. Foreign public opinions have paid more attention to the impact of China’s demand on oil prices or the market.

In the situation that China’s oil consumption continues to grow rapidly, the sound of “China Energy Threat Theory” is very difficult to disappear in the short term. Wei Liunan, author of “The Threat of China,” points out that the international denigration of China’s achievements will continue for many years. Faced with the wave of denigration, Chinese people must avoid falling into a nationalist overreaction, because this attitude will only deepen the gap of misunderstanding and render their adversaries a weapon of attack. Because of the huge cultural differences between China and her partner countries, China sometimes has to give up some of the ways which she used to employ in the past, especially those expressions that would have a major impact outside China, so that the content of information can be accurately conveyed. If she does not adapt to the cultural background of the group that she has to get along with, China will encounter difficulties in transmitting information [13].

Diachronically, western countries had a lot of misunderstandings about China before the reform and opening up, which stems from the west’s natural hostility towards the east, China’s cutting off from the outside world and the gap between the two sides. With China’s opening-up, her international status increases continuously, and she promotes and expands the communication with other countries. Though the west’s misunderstanding of China’s political, military, and diplomatic activities has not completely disappeared, it has been seen less frequently than in the past. The old-fashioned misunderstanding of the west was obviously contrary to the facts. Now the misreading of the west to China mainly focuses on China’s economic development, diplomacy, and her impact of environment and energy on the world. So far, the United States has accepted the rise of China and has invited China to play a responsible role in the international system. Cooperation between the two countries is more favorable to each other, and the two sides should not be estranged by nervous worries [15].

Similarly, there is not a lack of the normal understanding of China in the west, and the threat theory is not the whole of the foreign views, especially the west’s views, toward China. It is certain that the threat theory has been rejected by some people, who accept China’s achievements and propose cooperation. On December 9, 2010, John Cassidy published an article on the New Yorker website titled “China’s ‘Threat’,” stressing that China is a valuable trading partner of the United States and deserves to get the deserved treatment rather than being considered as a potential enemy. The challenge posed by China is obvious, but many of China’s practices, such as acquiring technology from abroad, protecting the country’s new emerging industries, and promoting development with the national power, were all used by most countries in the past. China sometimes appears to be overly sensitive and nationalistic in confronting with the criticism of the outside world, which can be mainly attributed to the historical reasons—the war and blockades that have been triggered by the west against China in history. For its own sake, the west should not criticize Chinese people for failing to live up to the codes of conduct that westerners’ predecessors have not achieved, and should promote the communication between China and the west, encourage China to implement western intellectual property protection standards, and emphasize that the best way to turn China into an adversary is to regard her as an adversary [22]. On November 6, 2013, the US Forbes website published an article by Ali Vinay and it argues that China may be neither an ally of the United States nor an enemy. A researcher in Harvard Kennedy College’s Belford Institute for Science and International Studies explains the reasons why China is not likely to be an ally of the United States, and should not be labeled as an enemy [23]. Joseph Nye stresses that China has a long way to go before she can acquire the same power resources as the United States, and that she will face many obstacles in the course of development.

After the publication of China Military Report in 2006, all sectors of the United States criticized the “China Threat Theory” in a large scale, and many influential American experts and scholars stood up to speak. Howard W. French, president of the branch office of New York Times in Shanghai, criticizes the article published in International Herald Tribune, proposing that the Pentagon’s recent report on China’s military power shows that the United States is making “historical mistakes.” The Military budget of the United States is too large, no matter what the standard is, believes Carpenter, vice president of the Cato Institute, a well-known foreign policy expert in the United States. The Pentagon’s attempt to portray China as a military opponent of the United States is to justify its new defense and weapons budget. Most experts will define “threat” as a combination of strength and intention, said Mr. Bukzhe, director of Northeastern Asian Policy Centre at the Brookings Institution. Yes, China is strengthening its military power, but China has never shown its intention to utilize these strengths to attack America.

Keidel, senior researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Peter Boullier, an expert at the University of Johns Hopkins, Roach, chief economist of Morgan Stanley, Lardy, senior researcher of Peterson Institute for International Economics, Ikenson, an expert on trade in the Cato Institute, Mondale, a professor at Columbia University, and some other influential scholars criticize “China’s Economic Threat Theory” on various occasions, and put forward that the United States should not instigate extreme nationalist sentiment in the economic field. Many business people in the United States believe that “China’s Economic Threat Theory” is not worth a bargain, because they are very optimistic about the Chinese market, and benefit substantially from the cooperation with China’s enterprises.

Mr. Tang, journalist of The People’s Network in the United States, points out that the United States is a pluralist society of public opinions. Besides the group that renders the “China Threat Theory,” a large number of serious think tanks and scholars are paying close attention to the development of China and have drawn relatively fair conclusions. For example, the Brookings Institution, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Foreign Relations Committee, and other mainstream think tanks, in contrast to the traditional foundations, enterprise research institutes, and the “New Century” program, are more objective to China. Although the US Government will listen to various voices and opinions before making its decisions on China, the White House will generally be the top priority for the US National interest. Although the right-wing conservative “China threat” is sensational, in many cases disguised as patriotism, it is difficult to get onto the decision-making table [24].

2.1 Public Opinion Surveys

Consultants conduct public opinion surveys, usually by telephone, to measure the attitudes and beliefs of residents in communities from which jurors subsequently will be drawn. These surveys yield empirical profiles of favorable and unfavorable jurors, which are then used to guide the exercise of peremptory challenges, the mechanism by which attorneys arbitrarily deselect a certain number of individuals from serving on a jury. Although demographic and personality characteristics tend to show modest-at-best correlations with case-relevant beliefs, life experiences (e.g., personal victimizations, individual litigation history), attitudes about social issues, and general values can be fairly robust predictors of verdict tendencies and therefore are the focus of many surveys.