Public Opinion

The most popular meaning of public opinion refers to the beliefs, attitudes, and preferences prevailing among the members of a given community. Although public opinion is often personified, it is, in fact, a random aggregation of individual opinions that are lacking any internal coordination. The influence of the concept of public opinion arose with the growth of modern democracies, with their expanding electorates in the twentieth century. Polling citizens' prior to presidential elections in the United States started as early as 1904, but the rapid growth of the industry of public opinion research took place after World War II. Increased literacy, improved means of communication and the emergence of mass consumerism made public opinion research an indispensable tool for politicians, but also for advertising and marketing experts, who needed to know what most of the public thinks. Nowadays, market research is a multibillion-dollar worldwide industry, and using public opinion polls to monitor satisfaction with government activities and to inform electoral campaigns are standard practices.

Growth of interest in public opinion resulted in the emergence of various methods of interviewing respondents, as well as methods of sampling of who is to be interviewed. Different types of questions and wordings have been invented to most accurately measure subtleties of opinions and beliefs. The most popular surveys are either face-to-face or telephone/mail surveys aimed at random or quota samples. Random polls involve interviewing randomly selected members of a population: As each of them has a known probability of being selected, the error resulting from underor overrepresentation of certain types of individuals can later be taken into account. Quota polls are based on samples that reproduce the social distribution of individuals in the population. Both methods are aimed at reconstructing opinions that would be representative for the general public. The establishment of Public Opinion Quarterly in 1937 brought official acknowledgment of public opinion research as a part of the social sciences. Since then, public opinion surveys are a recognized source of data for research in the social sciences, particularly in sociology and political science.

While the knowledge of public opinion is certainly an important cue for assessing relevancy and adequacy of governmental policies, it is important to remember that public opinion is susceptible to manipulation, especially by the media. So-called persuasion, when the tone of information coverage causes shifts in public opinion, and agenda setting, when media's attention makes the public see a given issue as particularly important, are among the most common strategies of influencing public opinion. It is also known that negative information has a stronger effect on public opinion than positive news, which, in turn, affects the choice of campaign strategies.