PUBLIC OPINION

In the previous chapter we discussed the various possible routes to understanding and measuring public opinion, but we only briefly considered its historical development. This chapter explores the history of public opinion: the ways that intellectuals, citizens, and leaders have thought about that concept through the ages and the ways that they have communicated and evaluated the popular sentiment.

There are two approaches to investigating the history of public opinion. One focuses on intellectual history: how philosophers and theorists in various epochs have thought about public opinion. Alternately, we can focus on sociocultural history, that is, the means people have used to communicate their opinions and the techniques leaders have employed to assess those expressed beliefs. In this chapter we explore both sorts of history so that you will understand the philosophical development of public opinion and the “nuts and bolts” of how it has been expressed and measured in different places and times. We begin with the intellectual history of the concept of public opinion and then move to social history.

A few prefatory comments are in order. First, since the history of public opinion—intellectual and social—is so lengthy, we cannot explore all topics, debates, events, or theories in great depth. Here we provide a schematic map of the history, not a definitive reference. Second, this chapter focuses on the ways that public opinion has been discussed, expressed, and assessed in the West—primarily in the United States, the United Kingdom, and European nations. This geographical exclusiveness is unfortunate, but contemporary notions of public opinion in the United States draw most heavily on Western intellectual traditions. Through the ages, individuals in many South American, African, and Asian cultures have undoubtedly thought about the idea of public opinion, but not much of this thinking has been integrated into American political culture and institutions. Finally, just as different definitions of public opinion exist today, philosophers and citizens in different eras have understood the phrase (or similar phrases) differently, depending on their political, technological, and cultural circumstances (see Box 2.1). If the meaning of public opinion seems difficult to pin down, that is exactly our point: the meaning is always in flux, depending on the context in which the term is used.

BOX 2.1

One Philosopher’s View

Jürgen Habermas is one of the most important and prolific philosophers of our time. Fortunately for us, he has focused his immense talents on the history and meaning of public opinion in a variety of books and journal articles. This chapter owes much to Habermas, a German scholar whose work has been enormously influential in almost all academic disciplines, among them political science, communications, sociology, philosophy, literature, anthropology, and history. Habermas believes that the meaning of public opinion shifts in each era and that this meaning is always tied to the nature of the broader political and social arena that he calls the “public sphere.”

The public sphere is the forum for discussion of politics outside of our homes but also outside of governmental circles. In other words, talk about family matters or discussion of politics within a household is not part of public sphere discourse, nor is talk among congressional representatives or between the president and his advisers. Public sphere talk is what one hears in a neighborhood bar or on talk radio. One can also find public sphere discussions in the editorial pages of newspapers, both regional and national, or in the large number of American current affairs magazines.

For Habermas, the meaning of public opinion and the ways we express it are always changing because the nature of public life itself is always shifting. In mid-nineteenth-century America, for example, women were typically not part of the public sphere. Middle-class women ruled the domestic sphere—caring for children and for their homes—but played only social roles in public (e.g., as hostesses, entertainers, or supporting players to husbands and fathers). Since women were largely absent from the public sphere in any serious sense, their voices were not considered part of public opinion. As a result, they could not vote and tended not to write letters to editors or vigorously campaign for political candidates. “Public opinion” in mid-nineteenth-century America meant the opinions of certain classes of men.

Habermas summarizes the connection between public opinion and public life in this way: “A concept of public opinion that is historically meaningful, that normatively meets the requirements of the constitution of a social-welfare state [such as our own], and that is theoretically clear and empirically identifiable can be grounded only in the structural transformation of the public sphere itself and in the dimension of its development.”

SOURCES: Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), quoted passage on p. 244. An application of Habermas’s ideas to the analysis of women in the nineteenth century is given in Mary Ryan’s Women in Public (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).

There are many compelling questions about current public opinion: how Americans feel about US intervention in foreign conflicts, how we evaluate the president and other political leaders, how opinions differ across various social groups, and so forth. Given all these questions, why should we be concerned about past notions of public opinion or the ways people expressed themselves centuries ago?

History matters for two major reasons. First, and most obvious, an understanding of history enables us to understand the present: how things got the way they are. Here is an analogy from social life. If we want to fully understand why a friend acts the way she does, we need to understand her life experiences: her family background, where she grew up, the sorts of schools she attended, and so on. Similarly, to understand the political culture of contemporary America, we need to know about the past: how political parties evolved, how the Constitution has been amended, how social movements have changed the practice of politics, and the like. In the narrower area of public opinion, historical context also matters. For example, opinion polling became very popular in America largely as a reaction to dictators, such as Adolf Hitler, who attempted to speak for the people instead of letting them express their own opinions. After two bloody world wars and the rise of various totalitarian regimes, polling seemed like a very democratic way to communicate public opinion.

Second, history gives us a sense of possibility. We have become accustomed to polls and the statements of interest groups being indicators of public opinion, but history provides examples of many other ways in which people have expressed themselves. When we recognize just how many options exist for communicating beliefs, we can become more creative in expressing and evaluating public opinion. For example, later in this chapter we discuss the creative rituals of eighteenth-century Europeans and how those rituals expressed public sentiment about certain institutions. If we think about rituals in general as a means for expressing public opinion, we can recognize that some of our contemporary rituals are also expressions of public opinion. Rituals such as Memorial Day parades or commemorations of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings at the end of World War II enable citizens to express both love of country and critical attitudes toward government.

As we turn to the intellectual history of public opinion in ancient Greece, both these points are underscored. We begin with ancient Greece because the written history of democracy (public self-rule, or participation in politics and government) begins there. How early Greek philosophers debated democracy—and how Greek citizens practiced it—have influenced discussions of governance, representation, political participation, and human nature ever since.

The phrase “public opinion” was not used widely before the nineteenth century, but many political philosophers of the ancient period used similar phrases to speak about popular sentiment. Plato, a Greek philosopher of the fourth century BCE, acknowledged public opinion as a central force in political affairs, but he doubted that people could realize their own best interests or work on their own to create a morally sound state. Plato thought that the just state should be governed by philosopher kings, and that members of the public should be educated to appreciate how these leaders act on behalf of the common good in order to understand and appreciate their government and the laws they lived under. Early twentieth-century scholar Ernest Barker put it this way: “The Greeks believed in the need of education to tune and harmonise social opinion to the spirit and tone of a fixed and fundamental sovereign law. The modern belief is in the need of representation to adjust and harmonise a fluid and subordinate law to the movement of a sovereign public opinion or general will.”¹ That is, the modern view puts the public first: public opinion should be the basis of all law, and laws should be altered as the public mood shifts.

Other Greek philosophers writing in the same period disagreed with Plato’s negative assessment of the public’s capabilities, although they did not hold the modern view. In particular, Aristotle argued most eloquently for the voice of the public, defending the wisdom of the common citizen. As scholar Robert Minar puts it: “Aristotelian political theory seems to suggest that public opinion may be regarded as the vehicle of the spirit and continuity of the life of the organic community. It carries the enduring wisdom of the social organism and reflects that wisdom on the particular, immediate actions of government.”²

Aristotle did not see public opinion as the sentiments people held toward particular issues of the day, although he saw those attitudes as important and worth articulating. Instead, he emphasized the prevailing values, norms, and tastes of the citizenry—what sociologist Robert Merton much later called the “climate of opinion.” This broad opinion is then funneled through institutions (such as courts and schools), which serve as moderating influences. In other words, institutions take “raw” opinion from communities, organize it, eliminate irrationalities, and make it coherent. Aristotle was undoubtedly more optimistic about the role and nature of public opinion than were many of his predecessors, who advocated for democracy but still did not really trust the people (see Box 2.2).

BOX 2.2

Aristotle Versus Plato: The Value of Public Opinion

Since Plato and Aristotle wrote about public opinion in the fourth century BCE, thousands of scholars of political theory have debated and reinterpreted their ideas. Even today, because those ancient texts were so immensely thoughtful and complex, a large number of thinkers scrutinize them, looking for cues about how democracy might work. Perhaps the best way to evaluate the argumentation of Plato and Aristotle is to turn to their original statements. These quotes are removed from their original contexts, but they will give you some idea of how these philosophers conceptualized the public will.

In The Republic, Plato explicates his famous analogy of “the cave” and writes on a variety of other topics, from mathematics to child rearing. He argues that democracy produces a sort of chaos that makes its citizen lose sight of right and wrong, of beauty, and of all that is “good.” Not all men have good character:

In a democracy you must have seen how men condemned to death or exile stay on and go about in public, and no one takes any more notice than he would of a spirit that walked invisible. There is so much tolerance and superiority to petty considerations; such a contempt for all those fine principles we laid down in founding our commonwealth, as when we said that only a very exceptional nature could turn out a good man, if he had not played as a child among things of beauty and given himself only to creditable pursuits. A democracy tramples all such notions under foot; with a magnificent indifference to the sort of life a man has led before he enters politics, it will promote to honour anyone who merely calls himself the people’s friend. … These then, and such as these, are the features of democracy, an agreeable form of anarchy with plenty of variety and an equality of a peculiar kind for equals and unequals alike.

Thus, Plato is concerned about the “side effects” of democracy: neglect of social values, lack of enforcement of societal norms, and an undeserved sort of equality. Citizens are far from equal in their intelligence, education, aesthetic sense, or integrity. Democracy, Plato argues, demands more from the public than it is capable of giving.

In contrast, Aristotle sees wisdom in the ideas and expressions of citizens acting in public. He glories in the diversity and the very inequalities underscored by Plato. He notes in The Politics:

It is possible that the many, no one of whom taken singly is a good man, may yet taken all together be better than the few, not individually but collectively, in the same way that a feast to which all contribute is better than one given at one man’s expense. For where there are many people, each has some share of goodness and intelligence, and when these are brought together, they become as it were one multiple man with many pairs of feet and hands and many minds. So too in regard to character and the powers of perception. That is why the general public is a better judge of works of music and poetry; some judge some parts, some others, but their joint pronouncement is a verdict upon the whole. And it is this assembling in one what was before separate that gives the good man his superiority over any individual man from the masses.

The arguments between Plato and Aristotle about the value of public opinion continue today, although in a somewhat different form. As we discuss in Chapter 4, some observers believe that public opinion should play a minimal role in policymaking because of its many defects. Others agree with Aristotle that, at least in some circumstances, the opinions of the public at large are more trustworthy than those of any one person.

SOURCES: Plato, The Republic, ed. and trans. Francis MacDonald Cornford (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), quoted passage on p. 283; Aristotle, The Politics, ed. and trans. T. A. Sinclair (Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1962), quoted passage on p. 132.

The great philosophers of ancient Rome, like Plato before them, generally were skeptical of the common people and their desires. Cicero, the renowned statesman and orator, claimed, “Sic est vulgus: ex veritate pauce, ex opinione multa aestimat,” which can be translated as “This is the common crowd: judging few matters according to truth, many according to opinion.” The Romans did not dismiss public opinion completely, but they believed that it mattered most in regard to leadership. Were statesmen honored by the people? Were they popular? Much discussion of public opinion in Roman times was oriented around this narrow dimension of politics.³

For our purposes we can leap forward from the ancient Romans to Niccolò Machiavelli, the Italian statesman and writer, who began to write at the start of the sixteenth century (see Figure 2.1). Machiavelli is best known for his book on political strategy, The Prince, written as an advisory tract for potential rulers. In it he discusses such questions as how a prince should act (“bear himself”) in public, whether he needs to build fortresses, and whether it is better to be feared or loved by the people. Machiavelli writes at length, and with derision, about the nature of the people:

For of men it may generally be affirmed that they are thankless, fickle, false, studious to avoid danger, greedy of gain, devoted to you while you are able to confer benefits upon them, and ready, as I said before, while danger is distant, to shed their blood, and sacrifice their property, their lives, and their children for you; but in the hour of need they turn against you. … Men are so simple, and governed so absolutely by their present needs, that he who wishes to deceive will never fail in finding willing dupes.⁴

FIGURE 2.1 Niccolò Machiavelli. Political adviser and author of The Prince.

From Machiavelli we see how closely early theorizing about public opinion and governance was tied to observations about human nature. Before the twentieth century, it was conventional for philosophers to speculate about the essence of human nature so that they could provide a holistic picture of man as political animal: Machiavelli believed that humans are so obsessed with their immediate desires and comforts that they cannot rule themselves, thus leading to his political theory that the people must be governed by a benevolent dictator.

He respected public opinion as a political force that could harm the prince and the state, but not because he thought it had any inherent virtue, as Aristotle did. Machiavelli’s perspective may seem antithetical to democratic theory and irrelevant in the US context. Yet similar thoughts about the citizenry are sometimes held today by journalists, policymakers, and citizens alike, whether or not this cynicism is openly expressed.

Machiavelli is best described as a conflict theorist, one who believes that underlying even the most peaceful society are conflicting values, unfulfilled needs, and animosities. He perceives a fundamental conflict in society between ruler and ruled. These two parties are always suspicious of each other, although the prince always has the upper hand. Machiavelli warns leaders to emphasize their superior strength, but also to be seen as acting with kindness and grace in the best interests of the people. In summary, for Machiavelli, public opinion was volatile, irrational, and potentially explosive. Leaders must be vigilant to ensure that their people continue to hold them in high regard.

Following Machiavelli in the seventeenth century were Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, two English philosophers who also had a great interest in the relationship between the people and the state. Hobbes, like Machiavelli, had a negative view of human nature, believing that people live in constant competition as they vie for property, reputation, and personal safety; he wrote in The Leviathan that life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Hobbes’s works are interesting from our perspective because he is an early contract theorist, believing that public opinion is crucial to the formation of the state. In Machiavelli’s philosophical world, statesmen design society; the public plays no positive role. For Hobbes, on the contrary, people agree to the fundamental rules that establish government. Hobbes sees little role for public participation once the state is established and supports the notion of a benevolent dictator. Yet he argues that the state is created through a contract between the public and its leadership. If the state were to crumble—due to internal or external pressure—the citizenry would create a new governmental system.

John Locke, a contemporary of Hobbes, shared his belief in the contract, the agreement among people and leaders about how their community is to be governed. Yet Locke is far more optimistic about human nature and about the value of public participation in politics. Locke’s theory of government greatly influenced our own Founding Fathers, who drew upon Lockean political theory in their plans for uniting the American colonies. He devoted considerable energy to arguing for his theory of inalienable natural rights that should be protected by the state. Like many philosophers of his day, he was somewhat skeptical about popular opinion, though he believed fiercely in the articulation of public opinion as a critical part of politics.

It may seem strange that Aristotle’s relatively high view of public opinion was largely abandoned until Locke wrote in the 1600s. Yet democracy itself, as we understand it, has had a fairly short history, given the length of human existence. Even the ancient Greeks, who often are said to have invented the idea of democracy, were not quite democrats in the contemporary sense: in ancient Greece women, foreigners, and slaves had no voice in politics whatsoever.

The eighteenth century was a time of immense political and social change. It was the century of the French and American Revolutions, and both were grounded in political philosophy. The most important discussions of democracy and public opinion occurred in Europe. Some leading early American statesmen, such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, often participated in these debates during the considerable time they spent in France and Great Britain. Many other American leaders paid close attention to European thinkers of their day, particularly the French philosophers. This loose network of French philosophers produced some of the most original and compelling tracts on public opinion in the years before the French Revolution. This is a period often referred to as the Enlightenment, since there was great emphasis on the development of the human mind and spirit through science, the arts, and participation in political discourse.

Perhaps the most important work on public opinion was produced by Jean- Jacques Rousseau, a brilliant and unruly Enlightenment thinker who challenged a variety of social norms and existing theoretical paradigms (see Figure 2.2). The young Rousseau, who appeared on the Parisian philosophical scene from a rather humble background, developed an elegant theory of the state, with public opinion occupying a central role. Again, like philosophers before him, he was somewhat suspicious of the commoner. But more than any thinker to date, Rousseau thought it necessary to place considerable power in the hands of the public.

Like John Locke, Rousseau was very concerned with the rights of individuals. Yet he also placed great value on community and the need for people to respect and listen to each other. The state, Rousseau believed, was based on the general will: what citizens want when they think about the whole of the community. In other words, the general will is our most empathetic set of attitudes, or what we believe is the best course of action to promote the general welfare of the populace. Rousseau’s discussion of the general will is somewhat complex and even confusing at times. He argues that public opinion is both an aggregation of individual opinions and a more organic force rooted in shared values and attitudes. For Rousseau, then, citizens think about themselves and their needs but are also capable of thinking about the general good of society (see Box 2.3).

We cannot leave the era of the French Revolution without mentioning Jacques Necker, finance minister to Louis XVI, widely believed to have popularized the phrase “public opinion.” Necker recognized that political discourse and the nature of politics had changed dramatically in the eighteenth century. For the first time, a bourgeoisie had emerged to gather and discuss politics through interpersonal dialogue and the press. At the time, public opinion meant the opinion of the middle classes. Even in a monarchy, Necker recognized just how much of the institutional structure of the state rested on the benevolence of public opinion. He noted that most foreigners “have difficulty in forming a just idea of the authority exercised in France by public opinion; they have difficulty in understanding the nature of an invisible power which, without treasures, without a bodyguard, and without an army gives laws to the city, to the court, and even to the palaces of kings.”⁵

In the nineteenth century various political philosophers tackled the problem of public opinion. Among them were the English scholars known as the Utilitarians. Jeremy Bentham was the first of the Utilitarians to write extensively about public opinion, and he was most interested in how public opinion acts as a sanction or constraint. Bentham believed that public opinion keeps society in equilibrium by preventing people from engaging in non-normative behavior. People are afraid of public opinion, so they dare not step outside the bounds of what is “acceptable” to most other people. This view of human society may seem bleak, but Bentham and other Utilitarians were most concerned about maximizing happiness among the populace through maintaining social harmony, preferably without resort to state violence. Bentham and John Stuart Mill, another writer in this British philosophical circle, supported democracy but emphasized the importance of majority opinion. In fact, they thought that laws are only needed where the “law of opinion” is not working effectively.

BOX 2.3

Rousseau on the General Will

In The Social Contract (1762), Jean-Jacques Rousseau explicated the notion of a “general will,” a broad form of public opinion. He believed, unlike so many philosophers before him, that people were difficult to manipulate. People, Rousseau argued, are basically honest and expect honesty from others, including their leaders. In the chapter “That the General Will Is Indestructible,” he discusses human nature and its relationship to the general will:

As long as several men united together regard themselves as a single body, they have only a single will which relates to their common preservation and to the general welfare. Then all the mainsprings of the state are vigorous and simple, its maxims are clear and luminous, there are no tangled, contradictory interests, the common good is everywhere clearly evident and requires only good sense to be perceived. Peace, union, equality are enemies of political subtleties. Upright and simple men are difficult to deceive due to their simplicity: traps, sophisticated pretests do not deceive them. They are not even sharp enough to be duped. When, among the happiest people in the world, one sees bands of peasants settling affairs of state beneath an oak and always acting wisely, how can one help but scorn the sophistication of other nations which make themselves illustrious and miserable with so much art and mystery?

This passage may strike you as strangely naïve. How many people can gather with a “single will” and spontaneously agree on the common good? Yet Rousseau’s view that ordinary people have a clearer sense of the common good than political leaders vying for advantage is one that is widely shared.

SOURCE: The Major Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Two Discourses and The Social Contract, translated and edited by John T. Scott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), quoted passage on p. 295.

Similar views of public opinion as a force of social control were held by Alexis de Tocqueville, the French observer of nineteenth-century American politics. In his landmark study Democracy in America, still considered a seminal work of political theory, Tocqueville stated this about the way public opinion affects writers and artists:

In America the majority has enclosed throughout within a formidable fence. A writer is free inside that area, but woe to the man who goes beyond it. Not that he stands in fear of an auto-da-fé [style of public sentencing from the Inquisition], but he must face all kinds of unpleasantness and everyday persecution. A career in politics is closed to him, for he has offended the only power that holds the keys. He is denied everything, including renown. Before he goes into print, he believes he has supporters; but he feels that he has them no more once he stands revealed to all, for those who condemn him express their views loudly, while those who think as he does, but without his courage, retreat into silence as if ashamed of having told the truth.⁶

In the same work, Tocqueville made his famous argument about political equality and its relationship to mass opinion. He noted that in societies with extreme inequality—in an aristocracy, for example—public opinion is not viewed as particularly important. He argued that disadvantaged people in such societies generally recognize that others are better educated and more worldly than they are and therefore have more informed opinions. Yet as citizens achieve greater equality, they are less likely to defer to their supposed betters and are more respectful of majority opinion:

The nearer men are to a common level of uniformity, the less they are inclined to believe blindly in any man or any class. But they are readier to trust the mass, and public opinion becomes more and more mistress of the world. … In times of equality men, being so like each other, have no confidence in others, but this same likeness leads them to place almost unlimited confidence in the judgment of the public. For they think it not unreasonable that, all having the same means of knowledge, truth will be found on the side of the majority.⁷

This insight is particularly relevant in an age of mass communication, in which citizens potentially can gather extensive information about public affairs as a basis for their opinions. Although Americans are far from equal in wealth or education, most do have some access to news sources, particularly since the advent and growth of the Internet. We tend to think that we and everyone else are entitled to an opinion—and, accordingly, we tend to value majority opinion.

At the same time that Tocqueville was writing about American politics, Karl Marx was studying political and social life from an entirely different standpoint (see Figure 2.3). In Tocqueville we see a celebration of some aspects of democracy and deep concerns about others. In Marx we see a man who was completely dissatisfied with the status quo and believed that democracy (like other forms of government) was subject to corruption by the forces of capitalism. To this day, many scholars argue that democratic ideals have been co-opted or even crushed by capitalism and consumer culture. The argument is complex, but simple examples of this conflation between democracy and capitalism abound. Contemporary neo-Marxists argue that Americans (and citizens of young Eastern European democracies) tend to think of freedom as consumer choice: the right to choose among a variety of products and lifestyles. Social choices such as regulations imposed on business are more likely to be construed as restrictions on freedom than as the free choices of a free people.

FIGURE 2.3. Karl Marx’s Identity Card. Marx wrote about public opinion, although he used the language of class oppression to discuss formation of public attitudes.

Marx did not often use the phrase “public opinion,” in part because it was not commonly used in German philosophical thought until later in the nineteenth century. Yet he and Friedrich Engels, his collaborator and patron, did argue strongly that organic, grassroots public opinion is rare. In The German Ideology, for example, Marx and Engels argue that common citizens tend to mimic the opinions of those in the ruling class—people with great wealth and power—even though these attitudes are often not in their best self-interest. As a result, Marx and Engels assert, the working class does not wield much political power. It is unable to realize its interests because its members have come to believe that the ruling class knows what is best. This process, in which the ideas of an elite class become widely held, is often called hegemony in the academic literature. Marx and Engels made the initial statement about this phenomenon, although since 1846 much more has been written on the subject:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force in society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. … For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones.⁸

Late in the nineteenth century a British statesman named James Bryce traveled widely in the United States, observing the political scene. He devoted long chapters in his two-volume masterwork The American Commonwealth to examining public opinion, in an attempt to understand how the concept fit into the constellation of American institutions. Bryce was interested in how the expression and measurement of public opinion were related to party activity, to legislatures, and to the mass media (newspapers, during this period). He is often cited as the first “modern” theorist of public opinion, because his work was sociological and empirical. Instead of speculating on the grand nature of public opinion, he looked for its manifestations in political culture. In fact, some critics would prefer that Bryce had spent less time reporting his observations and more time developing a philosophical or social psychological framework for them.

Despite such reservations about his work, Bryce is celebrated for foregrounding the crucial role of newspapers in the communication of public opinion. Tocqueville certainly recognized the value of newspapers, but Bryce explicated their role in far more detail. He believed that the mass media were astonishingly powerful in fin de siècle America and should hold a place among our other institutions (Congress, the courts) as a molder of public opinion. He noted in 1891, during an age when newspapers were far more obviously partisan than they are today: “It is chiefly in its … capacity as an index and mirror of public opinion that the press is looked to. This is the function it chiefly aims at discharging; and public men feel that in showing deference to it they are propitiating, and inviting the commands of, public opinion itself. In worshipping the deity you learn to conciliate the priest.”⁹

For Bryce, newspapers both reflect and direct public opinion, so the place of this medium in the political process is crucial. Bryce’s emphasis on the role of mass media feels contemporary, although other forms of media are increasingly important. Because contemporary journalists generally value objectivity as a goal far more than did journalists of Bryce’s time, the role of the media in advocacy has changed somewhat, but they remain powerful movers of public opinion. Newspapers endorse candidates at election time and, more important, value investigative reporting that can greatly change the course of public policy.

Bryce also recognized that the American newspaper contained multiple forms of public opinion, not only news stories and editorials, but letters from citizens as well. Letters to the editor had long been overlooked by theorists as a source of public opinion data, but Bryce underscored their role in the communication of popular sentiment. Near the end of his discussion of newspapers, however, Bryce made it clear that no one—politicians included—can depend entirely on newspapers to gain a comprehensive view of public opinion. As he noted:

Every prudent man keeps a circle of [four or five discerning friends of different types of thought] … by whom he can test and correct his own impressions better than by the almost official utterances of the party journals [newspapers]. So in America there is much to be learnt—even a stranger can perceive it—from conversation with judicious observers outside politics and typical representatives of political sections and social classes, which the most diligent study of the press will not give.¹⁰

The French sociologist Gabriel Tarde had even more to say on the relationship between newspapers and interpersonal discussion. Tarde noted in his 1898 essay “Opinion and Conversation” that “conversation at all times, and the press, which at present is the principal source of conversation, are the major factors in opinion.”¹¹ Tarde described a unidirectional model of opinion formation that can be depicted graphically (see Box 2.4).

After Tarde, various other political theorists tackled the fundamental questions about public opinion: what it means, how it operates, and how it relates to political institutions and culture. And more recent twentieth-century discussions of public opinion, particularly those based on empirical research, are covered in some of the following chapters. Yet a scholarly discussion from 1924 deserves mention here. In that year a group of prominent scholars of politics met at their yearly convention for a roundtable discussion of how to measure public opinion. According to the formal report, the roundtable began with an attempt to define terms:

BOX 2.4

Gabriel Tarde’s Model of Public Opinion¹

Media → Conversation → Opinion → Action

This is one model to use when thinking about the relationship of media to political action. Gabriel Tarde firmly believed that news media (in his era, primarily newspapers) are a national springboard for political discussion. Conversation about politics, in turn, enables people to clarify their opinions about various political and social policies so that they can act accordingly by voting, volunteering for a campaign, attending a demonstration, and the like.

One might take issue with Tarde’s model on several counts. For example, is it possible that conversation and discussion cause journalists to write particular articles? If that is the case, we need to put some sort of conversational variable in this equation before the element “media.” And we might question whether exposure to the media commonly leads to political action. Some researchers have argued that media are more likely to debilitate or dissuade us from political action than they are to prompt us toward political participation.

¹There is growing interest in Tarde, thanks in large part to Elihu Katz. See Elihu Katz, “Press–Conversation–Opinion–Action: Gabriel Tarde’s Public Sphere” (Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, 1997). On the question of whether media dissuade or encourage political activity, the classic discussion can be found in Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton’s “Mass Communication, Popular Taste and Organized Social Action,” in Lyman Bryson, ed., The Communication of Ideas (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1948). The diagram above is Katz’s interpretation of Tarde.

Some members of the round table believed that there is no such thing as public opinion; others believed in its existence but doubted their ability to define it with sufficient precision for scientific purposes. Others again … believed that the term could be defined, but were of different minds concerning the kind of definition that should be adopted. [After extensive discussion,] it was agreed that an exact definition of public opinion might not be needed until after the technical problem of measuring the opinions of the individual members of the public had been disposed of. It was decided therefore that the round table might well proceed to consider the problem of measuring opinion, especially that related to political matters, and avoid the use of the term public opinion if possible (emphasis added).¹²

By now you may appreciate the appeal of this choice. Like those scholars, we have not settled on a single definition of public opinion. However, we strongly disagree that measuring opinions is a mere technical problem that can be “disposed of” before grappling with definitional questions. Neither do we endorse simply avoiding the term “public opinion.” We do not suppose that political observers can stop caring about the concept of public opinion any more than they can abandon the concept of democracy. Both these concepts are contested, often in similar ways, because they matter. Rather than eschewing the complexity of public opinion, we prefer to use it as a gateway for exploring the challenges of democratic theory and practice.

Intellectual histories of public opinion such as the brief one provided above are crucial to understanding the philosophical development of the concept in political theory. Yet the social history of public opinion—how popular sentiment has been communicated and measured over time—is equally important and interesting. When we explore how public opinion has been expressed and assessed in previous eras, we gain much insight into the advantages and disadvantages of our own techniques for communicating popular attitudes.

In this section we often refer to methods of public opinion communication as public opinion technologies. That is, citizens and leaders alike use a variety of tools both to express opinions and to evaluate them. In contemporary American politics, the public opinion poll or survey is one of the premier technologies for expression and measurement of opinion. Newspapers remain important for communicating popular sentiment, as in Bryce’s day, although they are being superseded by new media.

Often the same tools can be used to express public opinion and to measure it. Consider political demonstrations. When thousands of people gather in Washington, DC, to protest a government policy or to show that a large number of Americans support a particular cause, identity, or political agenda, the marchers are expressing their opinions. At the same time, however, others are measuring those opinions. Journalists and policymakers can assess the size of the crowd as well as the rhetoric of the speeches and the intensity of feeling among rally participants. Thus, the political demonstration, as a technology of public opinion, enables both the expression and the evaluation of public feeling.

Before we begin our review of the more important technologies used throughout history to communicate people’s attitudes about public affairs, let us call out some broad trends in public opinion technologies. Three forces have altered these technologies through the ages:

3. A shift from local to national and even global opinion expression and assessment.

Techniques for communicating attitudes have become increasingly standardized and routinized. That is, people have developed more rigorous schemes for quantifying and aggregating public opinion so that it can be more easily understood. Furthermore, in capitalist societies public opinion data are a valuable commodity, so it is important to develop standard methods of opinion measurement that are valued by consumers, be they citizens, legislators, or media outlets. Random sampling techniques that enable a researcher to poll a small number of citizens and then generalize to all Americans are a relatively new set of tools, developed in the mid-twentieth century. The representative public opinion poll uses a much more standardized methodology than other technologies (such as counting the crowd members at a demonstration). This is not to say that opinion polls have superseded other techniques. All methods of communicating public opinion have positive and negative aspects, as we shall see in the following discussion.

The increased privacy of opinion expression is closely connected with the development of two opinion technologies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the secret ballot for elections and the straw poll (which evolved into the sample survey). Before the widespread diffusion of these methods, in which one’s identity is concealed, technologies of public opinion demanded that citizens either sign their names or show their faces; one had to sign a petition, for example, or appear at a political demonstration. There is no protection of a citizen’s identity in these cases.¹³ The rise of social media may have altered the trend toward privacy, but social media users do have some control over how widely they share opinions and whether their real identities are attached to them.

Another important trend is the increasing emphasis on national—as opposed to local—opinion. The historian Charles Tilly has eloquently characterized this shift. Tilly argues that expressions of opinion were largely local before the mid-nineteenth century:

Broadly speaking, the repertoire [of opinion techniques] of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries held to a parochial scope: It addressed local actors or the local representatives of national actors. It also relied heavily on patronage—appealing to immediately available power holders to convey grievances or settle disputes. … The repertoire that crystallized in the nineteenth century and prevails today is, in general, more national in scope: Although available for local issues and enemies, it lends itself easily to coordination among many localities. As compared with the older repertoire, its actions are relatively autonomous: instead of staying in the shadow of existing power holders and adapting routines sanctioned by those power holders, users of the new repertoire tend to initiate their own statements of grievances and demands. Strikes, demonstrations, electoral rallies, and similar actions build, in general, on much more deliberately constructed organization than used to be the case (emphasis in original).¹⁴

This shift from local to national expression of opinion was facilitated by the development of mass media, particularly the newspaper. Other factors contributed as well: the increasing importance of the nation-state as global actor, improvements in transportation infrastructure (roads, trains, etc.), and the greater size and scope of many national governments.

The number and variety of methods people have used to communicate and assess public opinion over time are extraordinarily large. Here we discuss some of the major techniques, those that scholars of public opinion have focused on most closely.

Among the most enduring public opinion techniques—which you might not immediately consider as such—is the art of rhetoric and oratory. As described by Aristotle, rhetoric is “the faculty of discovering the possible means of persuasion in reference to any subject whatever,” that is, the art of persuasive writing and speaking.¹⁵ (The related term oratory—derived from the Latin “oratorio”—usually refers to public speaking.) Of course the ancient Greeks did not invent persuasion, but their extensive discussions of the relationship between rhetoric and democratic politics has had enduring influence. For Aristotle, the value of rhetoric was to give a forceful accounting of true arguments so they may win out over false ones. From at least the fifth century BCE on, citizens and leaders of Greek city-states consciously employed rhetoric to argue for their preferred policies. Ancient Rome had its own vibrant practice of political oratory.

In many respects Greek and Roman citizens were sophisticated consumers of all this rhetoric. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a contemporary scholar of rhetoric, notes:

Ancient oratory was considered a fine art, an art regarded by its cultivators, and by the public, as analogous to sculpture, to poetry, to painting, to music and to acting. This character is common to Greek and Roman oratory. So, for example, Isocrates [a Greek orator] notes that listeners broke into loud applause when antitheses, symmetrical clauses, or other striking rhetorical figures were skillfully presented. … When the world of entertainment, persuasion and politics was in the main an oral one, listeners were drawn together in large numbers to experience a piece of communication.¹⁶

Regardless of what Aristotle’s intentions were, persuasion always poses dangers. In the words of German historian Wilhelm Bauer, “oratory rapidly developed as the technique best suited to the manipulation of public opinion and continued throughout later Greek and Roman times as the most powerful instrument of political propaganda and agitation.”¹⁷ The word demagogue (in Greek, dēmagōgos), literally just “leader of the people,” came to connote a politician who led the people astray to serve his own interests. Even the word “rhetoric” often implies empty or misleading words.

In ancient times rhetoric occurred in unmediated forums. Speakers addressed crowds in arenas and marketplaces, at festivals and public meetings of all sorts. Such direct address still occurs today, such as when legislators speak from the floor or when political candidates give speeches to gathered supporters. Yet these days much of the public speaking in political life is mediated by television, and that technology has changed the nature of rhetoric itself. About oratory over the airwaves, Jamieson notes:

Television invites a personal, self-disclosing style that draws public discourse out of a private self and comfortably reduces the complex world to dramatic narratives. Because it encompasses these characteristics, the once spurned womanly style is now the style of preference. The same characteristics comprise a mode of discourse well suited to television and much needed in times of social stress or in the aftermath of divisive events. By revivifying social values and ennobling the shared past, epideictic or ceremonial discourse helps sustain the state.¹⁸

The first technological breakthrough in the mediation and distribution of rhetoric occurred almost 2,000 years after Aristotle: the invention of the modern printing press (see Figure 2.4). Introduced in the later fifteenth century, the printing press enabled the formation of modern publics. That is, the publication of newspapers, books, and pamphlets made it possible for large numbers of dispersed people to communicate with each other. Before printing, most people could only communicate with neighbors and anyone they met while traveling (which was uncommon among ordinary citizens). With the introduction of printed materials about public affairs, however, people could ally themselves with causes, ideas, and organizations. The invention of printing was revolutionary in many respects, but its importance to the expression of public opinion is unmatched.

Printing made possible the mass distribution of knowledge itself. Common citizens, especially those in rural areas, could gain access to ideas about politics, religion, and the arts. The availability of inexpensive pamphlets, newspapers, and books boosted literacy rates in European nations, creating pressures for political reform. The explosion of printed materials was not accompanied by freedom of the press, of course, since monarchs could and did shut down newspapers when such publications threatened their rule. Indeed, some printers were tortured and executed for publishing newspapers that criticized the state.

FIGURE 2.4 “A True Representation of a Printing House with the Men at Work.” The printing press enabled the development of modern “publics”—geographically dispersed people who shared the same interests or points of view.

Printing served as a catalyst for the development of other public opinion communication techniques. The newspapers themselves carried opinions and letters to the editor, but they also served as a starting point for discussion among citizens. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for example, newspapers and books were vital to the evolution of two important opinion technologies: the coffeehouse and the salon.

Coffeehouses were popular places in England during the centuries following the introduction of printing (see Figure 2.5). Admission to these forums was cheap, and one could spend hours in coffeehouses reading newspapers and political tracts and arguing about ideas with other patrons. Eighteenth-century descriptions of coffeehouses noted that the mix of individuals in attendance varied greatly, with judges, journalists, and lawyers sharing tables with tradesmen, workers, and even the occasional thief or pickpocket. Perhaps the sociologist Lewis Coser best describes the importance of the coffeehouses as a technology of public opinion:

FIGURE 2.5 Lloyd’s Coffeehouse in London, 1978. Coffeehouses and taverns served as forums for political debate in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During this period, people went to coffeehouses for the express purpose of learning and talking about public affairs.

A common opinion cannot be developed before people have an occasion to discuss with one another, before they have been drawn from the isolation of lonely thought into a public world in which individual opinion can be sharpened and tested in discussion with others. The coffeehouse helped to crystallize a common opinion from a multitude of individual opinions and to give it form and stability. What the newspaper had not yet been able to accomplish was achieved to a large degree by the coffeehouse.¹⁹

Meanwhile, another forum for discussion and debate about public affairs became popular in France. Salons—gatherings of intellectuals, statesmen, and artists—were crucial to the development of political discourse in seventeenthand eighteenth-century France. Salons were in many ways less “democratic” than coffeehouses, which were open to all for a tiny entrance fee. The salons were run with an iron hand by bourgeois women, who decided who should be invited and what topics should be discussed. Despite this relative exclusivity, the effects of the conversations within these gatherings were tremendous. It was in the salons of Paris that Rousseau developed the ideas for his Social Contract, an essay often cited as laying the philosophical groundwork for the French Revolution. Many writers and artists refined their ideas in the salons before they wrote books for mass distribution. But salons, like all public opinion technologies, were also technologies for public opinion measurement. Kings and their courtiers regularly visited the salons to gather “data” about public opinion. These data reflected only a small, elite sampling of French opinion, yet since the ideas generated in salons were destined for diffusion throughout France and the world, such information was extraordinarily valuable to those interested in public opinion.²⁰

At this point we should revisit one of the issues raised in Chapter 1: the changing and contested meaning of the “public.” For the king of France in the eighteenth century to develop economic policy, for example, it was less important to gather public opinion from the French countryside than to monitor the way influential bankers and businessmen talked in the salons. Construing “public opinion” as the discourse of exclusive salon meetings may seem elitist, but in that context, salon discourse was the public opinion that mattered. In other settings, the scope of public opinion was disputed. For example, writing a bit later (in 1828), the English author William A. Mackinnon asserted that public opinion was “that sentiment … maintained by the best informed, most intelligent, and most moral persons in the community, which is gradually spread and adopted by nearly all persons of any education, or proper feeling.”²¹ Whatever else one thinks of it, this definition can reasonably be termed elitist; many observers did not agree that public opinion was the sole preserve of the best and brightest plus whoever happened to agree with them.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed the evolution of other interesting techniques for communication of public opinion. Two closely related ones are the petition and the public rally. Beginning as early as 1640, citizens of England petitioned Parliament about a number of public affairs, from taxes and monopolies to social issues and peace. Petitions were a very effective means of focusing legislators’ attention on topics of importance to common people. Petitions were presented peaceably at times, but very often an angry mob delivered its petition to Parliament in person. In a colorful description of violent petitioning during the first English civil war (1642–1646), a British writer noted how women—who were often the leaders in petitioning for peace—presented their demands. The women:

kepte knockinge and beatinge of the outwarde dore before the parliament house, and would have violently forced the same open, and required Mr Pym, Mr Strode, and some other members … and threatened to take the rounde heades of the parliament whome they saide they would caste into the Thames [River]. … These women were not any whit scared or ashamed of their incivilities, but cryed out so much the more, even at the doore of the house of Commons, Give us these Traytors that are against peace, that we may teare them in pieces, Give us Pym.²²

Not all petitioners were angry mobs, but so much violence accompanied the presentation of petitions to Parliament that in 1648 legislators passed a bill against unruly petitioning. This law was ineffective, so Parliament then limited the number of people who could present a petition to twenty. Even this did not deter violence, so in 1699, all petitioners were required to give their petition to their representative so that he could present it for them in parliamentary debate.

This series of incidents in British history could be interpreted in several ways. One might argue that the petitioners were too unruly to engage in the sort of rational political dialogue necessary for the construction of public policy. Mackinnon, if he had discussed these petitions, probably would have characterized them as “popular clamour,” the low-quality antithesis of public opinion. Alternately, we can read Parliament’s response as an attempt to dilute public opinion by preventing citizens from presenting their demands directly and jointly. Historians’ interpretations of these events, as well as other acts by citizens during the English civil wars, are interesting and varied.²³

Rioting and demonstrations can be seen as relatively new opinion technologies. Although crowds gathered in the ancient city-states of Greece and throughout the ages, rioting escalated as a form of public opinion expression in seventeenth-century England. Most of these “popular disturbances” (as they were called at the time) centered on economics: rioters protested fiscal policies of the Parliament as well as the food shortages and food price hikes resulting from those policies. In early twenty-first-century America, we are not accustomed to food rioting, but such demonstrations were common during this period. In a 1938 book, British scholar Max Beloff reports on his archival research concerning the food riots of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, for example in 1708:

The steepness of the rise in [grain] prices was indeed sharper in these years than at any other time in the period under discussion. … The populace was not slow to react. In May of 1709 it was reported from Essex that mobs of women amounting to hundreds were on the move and had threatened to ‘[set on] fire divers houses, and shoot several persons, by reason they have been dealers in corn to London, on pretense they make the same dear [i.e., expensive].’²⁴

Rioting is quintessentially public among public opinion technologies: the people involved expect to be heard. In contemporary American politics, we often witness demonstrations, strikes, and marches, as we did in 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri, and all around the country, after the shooting of Michael Brown and the grand jury decision not to indict the policeman involved. Yet the intensity of these gatherings pales in comparison to the violent protests over government economic policy in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England.

The general election is an even younger opinion technology. In modern democratic states, typically all legislators—and often other political leaders, such as the US president—are chosen through general elections, in which most adult citizens are eligible to participate. (While elections date back at least to the ancient Greek democracies, most officials in those city-states were not elected.) Many people consider general elections the most important mechanism by which public opinion influences policy in these countries, not only by selecting political leaders, but also by indirectly providing information about voters’ priorities. Unlike most previous means of expressing public opinion, votes cast in modern general elections are anonymous. The spread of the secret ballot in the latter half of the nineteenth century thus marked a turning point in public opinion: people could express their opinions without their neighbors (or even their families) knowing about them.

The spread of general elections in the United States in the early nineteenth century (although many adults could not vote) encouraged the rise of straw polling. Straw polling is “nonscientific” polling conducted with pen and paper, over the telephone, or by less formal means such as a “show of hands.” In the early nineteenth century journalists, party operatives, and citizens polled people in their communities about upcoming elections. Major newspapers, such as the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, often published polls conducted by their reporters, who traveled around the country covering political rallies and speeches. For example, many journalists conducted straw polls on long train or boat rides to get a sense of public opinion in the local community.

Were these straw polls accurate? Probably not, but it is difficult to tell in retrospect. In 1932 sociologist Claude Robinson published an analysis of straw polling that found much variability. Straw polls conducted in person tended to be more accurate than the sort that asked readers to cut a ballot from the newspaper and mail it in. Yet even the in-person interviews did not always yield accurate forecasts of upcoming elections.²⁵

Regardless of their accuracy, straw polls were important in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries because they were a vehicle for getting citizens involved in politics. First, straw polls made elections seem like “horse races.” This comparison may sound pejorative (and often it is), but news articles that emphasize a contest—who is ahead, by how much—may encourage voters to pay attention to the campaign. Second, people often conducted their own straw polls instead of waiting for journalists to poll them or their neighbors. Finally, historical accounts show that straw polling accompanied political discussion; the polling usually followed or preceded a debate about the issues and the campaign. Thus, straw polling prompted people to engage their neighbors and coworkers in discussions of public affairs. Do today’s scientific polls equally serve this function of inspiring public discourse? The answer is unclear, but the question merits consideration.

Regardless of the benefits of straw polling, more systematic and accurate approaches to opinion measurement were bound to emerge. The most famous pioneer of scientific polling, George Gallup, bolstered his reputation by showing up a straw poll. In 1936 a massive mail-in straw poll conducted by the Literary Digest, a popular magazine, mistakenly predicted that Alf Landon would easily defeat Franklin Roosevelt in the presidential election. Gallup, using a new technique called random sampling, did not determine the election outcome perfectly (he was off by 7 percentage points), but his result was far closer than the Digest’s.

The key to Gallup’s success was sampling theory, which dictates that one use methods of random selection to choose respondents for a poll (see Box 2.5). If one selects a survey sample at random from the population to be studied and response rates are reasonably high, the sample should “simulate” the opinions of the population. The Literary Digest did not use sampling methods; it simply relied on various lists of citizens (gathered, for example, from phone directories and auto registration records) and sent out millions of ballots, asking citizens to mark their preference for the upcoming election. The Digest had used this approach with considerable success since 1916, but in 1936, the people on its lists apparently were far less favorable to Roosevelt than the actual electorate was.

At this time, scientific surveys mark the last revolutionary change in how Americans think about and measure public opinion. (The Internet could provide the next major changes, as we discuss later in the book.) Petitions, rioting, and demonstrations are still influential means of expressing and assessing public opinion, but scientific polling is now the preeminent tool for communicating opinion. Since Gallup’s earliest polls, a variety of technical improvements in the collection and analysis of survey data have made preelection polling much more accurate. Polling on issues—how people feel about health care reform, foreign policy, and other current affairs—is still extraordinarily difficult and complicated. We discuss many aspects of sampling and survey design in Chapter 3, as well as several other methods of assessing public opinion.

BOX 2.5

George Gallup on Polling in a Democracy

George Gallup’s success as a pollster was primarily attributable to his early use of random sampling. Gallup had an almost religious belief that polling could strengthen democracy in America and beyond. In 1940 he and Saul Rae wrote:

The kind of public opinion implied in the democratic ideal is tangible and dynamic. It springs from many sources deep in the day-to-day experience of individuals who constitute the political public, and who formulate these opinions as working guides for their political representatives. This public opinion listens to many propagandas, most of them contradictory. It tries in the clash and conflict of argument and debate to separate the true from the false. It needs criticism for its very existence, and through criticism it is constantly being modified and molded. It acts and learns by action. Its truths are relative and contingent upon the results which its action achieves. Its chief faith is a faith in experiment. It believes in the value of every individual’s contribution to political life, and in the right of ordinary human beings to have a voice in deciding their fate. Public opinion, in this sense, is the pulse of democracy.

SOURCE: George Gallup and Saul Forbes Rae, The Pulse of Democracy: The Public-Opinion Poll and How It Works (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1940), quoted passage on p. 8.

As we have seen, the story of public opinion is long and varied. How a society thinks about public opinion depends on, among other things, the technologies available for expressing and communicating it, as well as the form of government in place. As governments change and new controversies arise, the same broad questions recur: Who composes the public? And how might we know its desires? As we saw in Chapter 1, these questions are difficult to answer. Yet no democratic state can evolve if its leaders and citizens fail to grapple with these fundamental theoretical and practical concerns.

1. Ernest Barker, Greek Political Theory: Plato and His Predecessors (London: Methuen 1918), 38–39, cited in Paul Palmer, “The Concept of Public Opinion in Political Theory,” in C. Wittke, ed., Essays in History and Political Theory in Honour of Charles Howard McIlwain (New York: Russell and Russell, 1964).

2. Robert Minar, “Public Opinion in the Perspective of Political Theory,” Western Political Quarterly 13 (1960): 31–44.

3. Thanks to Professor Jean Goodwin of Northwestern University for her translation and insights.

4. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. and ed. N. H. Thompson (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1986), 57–58.

5. Quoted in Palmer, “The Concept of Public Opinion in Political Theory,” 239.

6. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. and trans. J. P. Mayer (New York: Anchor Books, 1969), 255.

8. C. J. Arthur, ed., The German Ideology (New York: International Publishers, 1984), 65–66.

11. Terry N. Clark, ed., Gabriel Tarde: On Communication and Social Influence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969).

12. Arthur N. Holcombe, “Roundtable on Political Statistics,” American Political Science Review 19 (February 1925): 123–124.

13. For a more detailed discussion of these trends in the history of public expression, see Susan Herbst, Numbered Voices: How Opinion Polling Has Shaped American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

14. Charles Tilly, “Speaking Your Mind Without Elections, Surveys, or Social Movements,” Public Opinion Quarterly 47 (1983): 465.

15. Aristotle, Rhetoric 1.2.1, Aristotle in 23 Volumes, vol. 22, trans. J. H. Freese (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1926).

16. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Eloquence in an Electronic Age: The Transformation of Political Speechmaking (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 5.

17. Wilhelm Bauer, “Public Opinion,” in Edwin Seligman, ed., Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan, 1930), 671.

19. Lewis Coser, Men of Ideas: A Sociologist’s View (New York: Free Press, 1970), 20.

20. On salons and their place in political history, see Susan Herbst, Politics at the Margin: Historical Perspectives on Public Expression Outside the Mainstream (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

21. William Alexander Mackinnon, On the Rise, Progress, and Present State of Public Opinion in Great Britain and Other Parts of the World (London: Saunders and Otley, 1828), 15.

22. Quoted in Patricia Higgins, “The Reaction of Women, with Special Reference to Women Petitioners,” in Brian Manning, ed., Politics, Religion, and the English Civil War (London: Edward Arnold, 1973), 190–191.

23. See Manning, Politics, Religion, and the English Civil War, or Maurice Ashley, England in the Seventeenth Century (Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1968). On petitioning and political meetings in British history, see Cecil Emden, The People and the Constitution (London: Oxford University Press, 1956).

24. Max Beloff, Public Order and Popular Disturbances 1660–1714 (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), 68.