Notes on the Theory of Political Opinion Formation

Extract

The role of public opinion in the political process is more often justified than explained by political theorists. Insofar as contemporary theory offers an explanation, it replaces the primitive democratic notion of “The People as Legislator” with a neo-idealistic conception of public opinion as the “sense of the community” (A. D. Lindsay), an emergent product of the process of public discussion that enfolds the struggle of private group leaders, public administrators, and political representatives to influence the substance and direction of governmental policy.

However, this is not the meaning of the term as used either by the man in the street or by the social scientist. In both popular and scientific language “public opinion” has come to refer to a sort of secular idol, and is a “god-term” to which citizens, scientists, and office-holders alike pay allegiance, partly as an act of faith, partly as a matter of observation, partly as a condition of sanity. The public opinion idol has its high priests, claiming to be expert translators of the oracles of the personified deity. The idol aIso has its heretics, divided like all protestants into many denominations. The least heretical sect, perhaps, consists of those who postulate a conceptual fiction somewhat resembling the legal relation of “principal-and-agent,” except that they recognize that political representatives possess the power to act as trustees as well as agents of their amorphous principal.