Opinion, World

Concept of Public Opinion

The concept of public opinion owes its existence to a process by which opinion polls were equated to public opinion during the 20th century. They were first administered at the national level, and gradually multicountry surveys started to spread. According to authors such as Jürgen Habermas and Susan Herbst, the meaning of public opinion is historically contingent and fluent—it changes with transformations in the social, economic, political, cultural, and technological structures.

The two terms of the concept public opinion have a long life in intellectual history. The meaning of public and the meaning of opinion have undergone important changes. It was only during the Enlightenment that public opinion became thinkable in its democratic sense as a collective voice of the popular will.

Habermas explains that the idea of public opinion was the result of the appearance in the 18th century, within a delicate balance of social and institutional conditions, of a new social actor: the urban bourgeoisie that stood between state and society. During the 1930s and 1940s, the idea of public opinion as a measurable quantity started to spread and was soon installed as a symbol of democratic life.

The element of public in the opinion polls’ approach to public opinion refers to the sample of randomly chosen individuals who statistically represent society or a specific group. The term opinion means private and individual opinion: opinions that are not necessarily expressed within a process of discussion and interaction with others. That is, the result of sample surveys are an aggregation of individual opinions expressed to the interviewers in a private sphere. A public opinion expression is seen as an individual behavior analogous to voting in an election.

Clearly, surveys are the most objective measurement of world opinion. The argument that the Internet represents world opinion has been put forward by some commentators. Arguably, the Internet now provides individual-level data of opinion expression through a totally new source and medium of information and communication. But the Internet in itself does not represent world opinion if it is not measured in a systematic and statistically relevant way. This new medium is growing fast and will be used extensively in the coming years throughout the world. For example, there is already some opinion research work regarding quantitative content analysis of social [Page 1269]networks and blogs in different disciplines of the social sciences, such as sociology, political science, and social psychology. Nevertheless, even if the opinions expressed through the Internet are scientifically measured, it is imperative to remember that they would still represent those of a specific group of world citizens that have access to the Internet.

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