(Re)Thinking Public Opinion and Democracy

Transcription

1 (Re)Thinking Public Opinion and Democracy Graziella Castro School of Humanities, Language and Social Science University of Salford Salford M5 4WT DRAFT: PLEASE DO NOT CITE WITHOUT AUTHOR S PERMISSION Paper prepared for presentation to the panel Public Opinion on Democracy and the Context at 22nd International Political Science Association World Congress 8-12 July 2012 Madrid (Spain). 1

2 Introduction This piece tries to shed light on the relationship between democracy and public opinion and in particular, tries to explain how this relationship may be affected by the era of the new media. To do that, I will move in two directions. First of all, I will consider whether new media has brought any change to the space where Public Opinion is built up, that is, the public sphere. Secondly, I will explore the use of opinion polls as methods to analyse Public Opinion and whether their use in a system of representative democracy may bring about a phenomenon called sondocrazia (or rule by opinion polls ). The concept of democracy is based on legitimation by the citizens. In particular, it is the reason why democracy is government of the people, by the people, for the people. In other words, democracy arises directly from the people, belongs to the people and is used for the people. According to Dahl (2006), the main basic feature of democracy resides in its capacity to satisfy citizens preferences in a context of political equality. The most important element of this definition, and the one which underlines the normative feature of democracy, is the correspondence between the decisions taken by politicians and what people want. According to this, in a system of government in which the people are the leading and most important actor, the role of Public Opinion seems to be clear, that is, to clarify to politicians the opinions of people about the res publica. Expanding on this perspective, democracy is based on consensus and legitimacy conferred by the people themselves, and on the right of everyone to state their own opinion about the res publica. The basis and the meaning of democracy are represented precisely by those opinions, together with the act of voting. Hence the relationship between Public Opinion and democracy is still on the one hand, crucial because a democracy without transparent processes of public opinion-formation becomes a pseudo-democratic regime. On the other hand, the relationship between Public Opinion and democracy is a moot point because new media is changing the context in which public opinion is formed and within which it interacts, enabling it to be formed much more quickly. In this piece, the following question needs to be addressed: is Public Opinion still the main base of democracy? To do this, I develop my analysis by pursuing two different paths. In the first section, I consider two theories of Public Opinion and the public sphere in order to define these terms. Then, I explain the change that has taken place in the nature of the public sphere in the era of the new media and whether it has resulted in any change in the Public-Opinion building process. In the second section, I look at the phenomenon of sondocrazia. In other words, I discuss whether in this media context, democracy has been transformed into Sondocrazia. Democracy may have passed from a kind of government based on consensus and the conferral of legitimacy by the people and its right to state its own opinion about res publica to a kind of government based on the results of polls about matters of public interest. In the last section, I draw the conclusions that are suggested in the light of what has emerged in the first two sections. 2

3 The Public Sphere and Public Opinion In the literature, the concept of Public Opinion is one of the most difficult to define. Before discussing the relationship between democracy and sondocrazia, it seems useful to look in more depth at the concepts of the public sphere and Public Opinion. In particular, I will take into consideration two theories (those of Lippmann and Habermas) focusing on their explanations of the opinion-building process. The public sphere is composed of all those places where people can discuss together or meet each other in order to think about general matters. Those places are streets, coffee houses, theatres, politics conventions and so on (Privitera, 2001). In other words, it refers to all the conditions under which we are enabled to start opinion-building processes. On the basis of Habermas theory, the public sphere is the site of the public use of reason, the social context in which citizens can convince or be convinced and/or develop new opinions by communicating with each other in a public way. To do that, it is necessary that there be a process of legitimation, in terms of support for democratic society (Habermas, 1996). From a historical point of view, the public sphere is a product of at least three developments: a legal system based on rights, individualisation processes, and the invention of printing. Regarding the former; the decline of the Greek and Roman polis gave rise to the emergence of a modern society where there is a distinction between political power and those who exercise it. In other words, the public individual s life no longer coincides with the private individual s life. The second condition is directly linked with the first one. Briefly, this type of distinction had the effect of changing how the individual sees and recognises himself. The centre of the individual s life moved from a political to a private identity. Regarding the third condition; the invention of printing changed radically the nature of the public space in terms of the abstraction of the opportunity for public assemblies. The location of discussion like space and time changed its principal feature due the development of media. In fact, from principal step of evaluation building process it became a step of checking the opinions. In this case, there is a distinction between the actors of the public sphere and the public. What became really important was to have influence and control of this new kind of public on the one hand, and to have the support of these actors due to the unpredictability of its reactions on the other. Having clarified what the public sphere is, I now consider two theories of Public Opinion: those of Lippmann and Habermas. Regarding the former, Lippmann (1922) has the great merit of having pointed out how Public Opinion is communicable to everybody using stereotypes. The stereotype is essential to the start of the process of confirmation because it has a poorly, basic, and fast spreading nature. On the basis of this, public opinion is the image used by groups of people or individuals who act on behalf of groups. Public opinion has a cognitive rather than a rational base because it is a consequence of representation, patterns of thought, and symbolic images that people have according to their connections with social and political realities. This definition allows Lippmann (1922) also to point out the natural contradiction of opinion-building processes. In other words, the relationship between 3

4 people and reality is based on taking for granted the reality rather than on the knowledge in terms of access to information, elaboration of physical images. This type of knowledge gives opinions. And this is a construction of reality process. As Lippmann (1922) argues, the individual acts on the basis of partial and streamlined representations of reality, called stereotypes. What the individual does is based not on direct and reliable knowledge, but on images that are self-made or given by others. The reason why individuals use stereotypes is that due to their streamlined representation of reality they allow individuals to attend to more than one topic or event at the same time. In this process, the media functions as chooser of the streamlined images of reality to give to its public as the most important. These pictures are seen as reality by people, as pictures in our heads 1. Given this, Lippmann argued that it does not matter how reality is actually, what it is important are our hypotheses about reality because on the basis of them we construct our expectations and efforts, which are real to us and which shape reality. There are two ways in which they do this: through self-fulfilling prophecies and through the collision between older and newer images of reality. In the light of this, if someone wants to study public opinion, they have to take into account a triangular relationship between scenes of action, the representation an individual has of the scenes of action and the reactions to this representation, which have effects on the scenes of action. In this process of mutual influence, the mass media is the new variable to build and strengthen stereotypes. In other words, the mass media select topics which will be important and on which the public will focus its attention. Hence, Public Opinion comes from the public sphere, which is influenced by the mass media. Habermas (1972) based his theory on the conversational and interactive nature of Public Opinion and the public sphere. Public discussion is the official dimension of the construction of social and political realities. The bourgeois public sphere is the site of the public use of reason where citizens may convince and be convinced and/or develop new opinions by communicating with each other in a public way. According to Habermas (1989), the bourgeois public sphere was the result of two important economic and political revolutions during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the claims of the bourgeoisie against the aristocracy and the affirmation of a new kind of individuality within society. In other words, the latter is a private sphere that is at the same time also individual and public. And when the individual acts in a public capacity, it means that she is the repository of public opinion using rational public argument. The latter is the dialogue and the public comparison of private citizens by using reason and rational discussion in space-time co-presence in a public space accessible to all (Habermas, 1996). On the basis of the principle of rational discussion, norms of action are valid only when all the likely people concerned might approve by participating in those rational discussions. Likely people concerned are all individuals whose interests are involved in the predictable effects of general practise regulated by the norm in question. The validity of norm is defined by all normative statements, in a different meaning to concepts of morality and legality (Habermas 1996). According to this, rational discussion is any attempt to reach agreement on problematic claims of validity as long as it occurs in a legitimated communicative space. The latter is the place where rules of dialogue 1 Chapter I, of Lippmann's book, Public Opinion is titled "The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads to remark the relationship between stereotypes and mass media. 4

5 oblige participants to observe the three important principles of universality, reversibility and reciprocity. These are the inclusion of all people involved, respect for the positions from which these people are arguing and equal recognition of instances of each people concerned from all the rest, respectively (Habermas 1996). In the light of this, claims of validity are universal due to the fact that validity is independent of the institutional or situational context and above all, speakers are enabled to act by virtue of their communicative competence. Habermas (1989) argues that Public Opinion is simply the opinions of all private citizens who are using reason in the public space through publicly accessible support (the mass media). In the basis of universalistic point of view, citizens discuss as men because they are legitimated by norms of communicative action. Indeed, this universalistic view allows us to defend our values by communicative actions recognising others as ends and not as means. This involves using three principles of dialogue. From this perspective, there are three models of Public Opinion: bourgeois public opinion, receptive public opinion, and almost-public opinion. First of all, the former model refers to the opinions of small groups of the enlightened bourgeoisie, which are in opposition to the absolute power using rational public arguments. To do that, there is a marked distinction between public and private space. In other words, the State mediates public instances from private citizens getting together in public space with necessity of society. The outcomes of this mediation have effects on the private sphere of those same citizens. The second model refers to all the attitudes, beliefs, orientations, and prejudices expressed in the personal sphere but which remain outside the public sphere. This type of public has only the function of absorbing the information or the stereotypes in Lippmann s sense deriving from the mass media. The distinction between public and private spaces does not exist because there are no longer small groups of the bourgeoisie. Therefore, mediation is performed by the mass media and not the State and in particular, mediation through political discussion takes place in the mass media and no longer in the public space. This worsening of public opinion as emancipatory and critical causes the third model that is almost-public opinion. The latter refers to formal and institutional opinions known only in selected groups separate from the rest of the population, which communicate with the latter and affect the political interest without using public rational arguments. Re-feudalization of the social sphere is the main cause of decline of the public sphere. This is in opposition to Habermas definition of public opinion in terms of communicative and interactive processes using a rational language with a universalism of targets and methods (mutual understanding). According to Habermas (1989), Public Opinion has two main purposes: to allow participants to be emancipative and to be critical of political power or in general of the State. This suggests the following question: to what extent is this kind of public sphere dominated by the mass media able to create public opinion? What characteristics does it have? The Public Sphere and New Media In the multimedia context of today, to understand the relationship between the public sphere and democracy on the one hand and between the public sphere and the opinion-building process on the other, the role of the Internet as public sphere and 5

6 in particular, as that space in which opinions are built up has become crucial. In fact, some scholars argue that the public sphere becomes a vehicle for capitalist hegemony and ideological reproduction. A digital medium like the Internet, with an infrastructure that promises unlimited and unregulated discourses that operate beyond geographical boundaries would suggest a virtual reincarnation of the public sphere (Paracharissi 2009:3). The new media do not do anything less than increase in an exponential way the boundaries of the public sphere in terms of gender/ class/race. It could be argued that the effect is not always positive. But, the principle of discussion of Habermas is still valid in order to build up Public Opinion from the public sphere. In other words, what in this process is necessary is that there is mutual respect on the part of all people involved and in particular, that people have the same rational condition to express their own positions/opinions. According to this, I take into consideration two important elements to allow rational discussion in the public sphere and in particular, whether they are still valid in the new media era: access to information and reciprocity during communication. Regarding the former, the Internet and the new digital technologies have developed a public space, which has never existed until now. And this does not include perforce that it could be considered as a public sphere. In other words, this limitless access to information does not automatically include the increase of political participation, civic engagement or consensus on political system. Therefore, those media have the advantage of creating an open public space which is however still accessible only to a small number of people. According to this, I could argue that through this space a political elite has the possibility to shape its own agenda setting by communicating directly with its electorate. Instead, access to information does not make the electorate active in any case, what it does is to create an open space in which anyone can get in. Then, the use of this open public space is still an exclusive factor of individual. Reciprocity is the second element of rational discussion. As it seems easy to gather from, the new media makes discussions independent of the physical location of the individuals involved. Nevertheless, it does not automatically mean that there is mutual reciprocity, this for at least three reasons. First of all, being unconstrained by physical boundaries does not mean that all the people involved are interested in the same topic of public interest. Secondly, according to the first reason, those people who come from different social, cultural and political backgrounds might not accord each other the same position in the discussion. If so, they do not exchange opinions in a mutually reciprocal way. Thirdly, people involved in the discussion might not understand one another thanks to differences in their socio-cultural-political backgrounds. At a deeper glance, these problems are still the same as those that Habermas (1989) has pointed out in his analysis of the public sphere and Public Opinion. Hence, it seems reasonable to argue that on-line rational discussions in the Habermasian sense still occur between those who already know each other or in any case have similar socio-cultural-political backgrounds. To answer the question posed at the beginning of this piece, the relationship between democracy and public opinion did not have radical and strong effects by the change of public sphere. In other words, the latter is still that space in which people can share and develop their opinions on res publica even if this space has amplified its features. Rather than, I may argue that the rational discussion now is weaker than before because it involves a huge amount of people at the same time, these people sharing information more quickly than in the past. And more important, sometimes 6

7 they communicate with others without having already fully or only in part listened to or read the opinions of others and they do that from their private sphere and not public sphere anymore. In other words, now the citizens are linked with the political system even when they are in their own private sphere acting in solitary way and with a political language that is sometimes intelligible only to them. Democracy and Opinion Polls: Sondocrazia? Having explained whether and how the public sphere may have effects on the Public Opinion building-process and accordingly on democracy, I will now consider the relationship between democracy and opinion polls. As I have previously stated, and paraphrasing Lincoln s definition, democracy is a kind of power of the people that comes from the people and is wielded for the people. In light of this, it seems reasonable to raise the following questions: how might the new technology have effects on democracy? What kind of consequences might it have? In this piece, I argue that technology has a strong influence on democracy in terms of participation (Rodota 2004). With this in mind, my main hypothesis is that this kind of technology turns democracy into a sondacrazia based on an over-use of opinion polls as mirrors of Public Opinion to the extent of creating a vicious circle in which politicians and citizens base their decisions on the results of opinion polls. In fact, as Lippmann argued Public Opinion is easily communicable through stereotypes due to its capacity to transmit a vision of, and above all, to allow the early shaping of, reality itself. Hence this new kind of public sphere considerably expands the space in which citizens can take their own initiative to share their opinions with others. This in the meantime changes the meaning of those traditional spaces of politics and communication. According to Rodota (2004) The ubiquity of people has effects on social, political, economic and knowledge processes (my translation). The mediacrazia represents the negative effect of this process when the media system replaces the independent public sphere preconditioning the role of citizens on the basis of assigned social roles and countering the effect of full liberty allowed by the new technologies. From this point of view, the Internet represents a place of disputes where participation means a kind of denial of citizens and democracy becoming unanimous. In other words, the role of citizens is only to receive and accept information from the media and no longer to decide or at least have a voice within the public sphere. To avoid this negative effect, cyberspace has to be available in the private sphere, which now becomes that space of full liberty necessary for each citizen to build his or her own public sphere. With this in mind, I argue that technologies have turned representative democracy into direct democracy in which citizens are constantly calling to take important decisions on res publica due to the new features of the context where these decisions are taken that is anytime and everywhere. One of the signs of this type of democracy is the constant use of opinion polls as a method of listening to and measuring opinions based on citizens decisions. As Rodota (2004) has argued, this kind of techno-politics (that is politics ruled by technology) have caused a democracy of opinions based on the self-representation of citizens themselves. In other words, there is a process of progressive inclusion of rising numbers of citizens inside a 7

8 democratic system that no longer has filters because they now play the role of full protagonist. Hence, to the traditional modality of the political system s functioning needs to be added an effect of replacement. In other words, the possibility of direct intervention of citizens may deny somehow the meaning of parliamentary procedures functioning due to the nonexistence of filters between these and citizens. But in the meantime, this kind of personalisation and autonomy take place together sharing constantly with other citizens becoming a real nervous system of society made up of all network connections. According to this, the strong personalisation and autonomy of citizens develop a constant exchange with others, build up new individual and collective subjectivities, and no less importantly make it easier to overcome the traditional distinction between producers and consumers of information. Despite this, it is necessary also to keep in mind the social use of those types of technologies that enable citizens to become users by fragmenting them into the following four dimensions: as users of means and messages; as individual producers that are respondents to opinion polls and then, Public Opinion producer; as actor of democratic scene, and as citizen of civil society. These dimensions are based on the type of mediation used. As Boullier (1994) has pointed out, these dimensions transform citizens into simple receivers of information, users of means; and the consumer or voter, when taking a decision, manages her desire by the mediation of norm (my translation). According to this, the technology has not done anything less than facilitate the participation process including all the risks involved. Sondocrazia represents one of these risks in terms of deforming democracy. In other words, the increasing use of opinion polls in conjunction with the new media has affected the political piazza changing it more into an electronic one and in the meantime strengthening the personal dimension of politics: the political personal side, protagonist side, and the audience of citizens side. Afterwards, the politician as candidate in an election is potentially able to remove the traditional boundaries of space and time using the new media, which no longer require personal intermediation. And in doing so, takes the form of sondocrazia as the process whereby the message, consultation and decision processes are mixed together. Before explaining how opinion polls may affect democracy, it seems necessary to clarify the aims of opinion polls and the reasons for their use. According to Gallup (1948), the main aim of opinion polls is to allow the nation 2 to act as a direct democracy. In other words, the ultimate tribunal of all political and social matters that is res publica, is the majority of Public Opinion and no longer a majority in Parliament. Despite evident limits, this approach has had extraordinary success in market research allowing not only the measurement of Public Opinion but in some cases its manipulation. The reason for the latter is that the increasingly widespread use of opinion polls has modified the meaning and the perception of Public Opinion itself, which has been translated and interpreted using only numbers even still today. Furthermore, the exponential growth of its use in conjunction with new technologies to gather data and process information have facilitated the reduction in the number of people required to make a sample reliable, that is increase the representativity and reliability of samples. Therefore, sondocrazia is manifested as a denial of democracy in terms of processes of communication, learning, and confrontation between citizens that hold the same position during the discussion. Instead, today 2 Nation means as sum of all citizens. 8

9 what has happened is that sondocrazia works as a social process where plays a mechanism of exclusion of almost the totality of citizens from which emerges only a limited group able to speak on behalf of all. In this way, there is a de-legitimization of electoral trends that is generally meant as a summary event of popular sovereignty. According to this, there is an important qualitative transformation of citizens when opinion polls allow the constant consultation of citizens with features of faster speed and frequencies and with which electoral consultation cannot keep pace. This type of transformation should not be confused with the capacity of opinion polls as methods to register and update needs and trends of Public Opinion thereby avoiding too many deep gaps in the prompt answers to real questions from politicians to the latter. The most important negative effects of sondocrazia have to do with the planning of long-term policies and in particular, unpopular decisions. In other words, it produces two different effects. First of all, the immediate recording of reactions of Public Opinion could be translated into reactions of indifference or lack of support for decisions aimed at producing long-term effects. Secondly, it produces a reaction of hostility to decisions that affect in a negative way the interests of some groups. According to this, sondocrazia distorts the rhythm of the representative democratic system due to its checks election spaced in time, which allowed unpopular decisions to be matabolised, and at the same time to make perceptible the effects of long-term policies. Hence, the transformation of democracy into sondocrazia is represented by this constant race to earn more possible the support of most different groups using effective policies in the short run, and in particular, is unleashed at the end of each term in the imminence of elections. In a context pervaded by new media, the race becomes faster and more frenetic setting in this way a shift of attention from the election opportunity to opinion polls. In other words, the latter seems to be considered as the crucial factor to the working of the institutional system. Just think how much is increased the dependence of politicians in basing their decision on opinion poll results during an election campaign. Therefore, opinion polls are a permanent electrocardiogram of Public Opinion that has influence both on participation and on the role of elected representatives. In addition, opinion polls make stronger the likely conflicts between the decisions of politician and their results. The latter create a most powerful meta- political-sphere in which plays a split between the citizen and voter who contemplates her image projected by various media and makes its decision based on this. This also turns into a political formation of agenda constantly based on the indication of opinion polls. In conclusion, the latter become an instrument capable of giving a strong power of building their own references with which Public Opinion is called to have a confront because is no longer a means of recording opinions. Conclusion The main question I started out with was whether it is still possible to consider Public Opinion to be the base of democracy in a context pervaded by new media and opinion polls. I started my analysis by looking at the two main theories about Public Opinion looking in particular at explanations of its relationship with the public sphere and the mass media. Then, I looked at the relationship between democracy and the phenomenon of sondocrazia, which arises from a distorted use of opinion polls. At least, I can draw two main conclusions from my analysis. First of all, theories of 9

10 Public Opinion as Lippmann and Habermas point out, are still valid in order to explain both the relationship with the media system (Lippmann) and what it is, when it occurs, and with which features (Habermas). In other words, despite the strong influence on the size and boundaries of the public sphere by the new media, Public Opinion is still built up in the public sphere with all Habermasian features of rational discourse. What emerged as dangerous for the public sphere is the absence of limits on access to information in terms of automatically rising of political participation, civic engagement or consensus on the political system. According to this, this type of public sphere is weaker than before because more people than ever are involved at the same time. Despite the problems pointed out, the public sphere remains that important space to build up Public Opinion, and a democracy, which without transparent processes of public-opinion formation becomes a pseudo-democratic regime. Secondly, I argued that technology has affected representative democracy (Rodota 2004). In other words, citizens are constantly called upon to take decisions on res pubblica using different types of technology. One of those is the use of opinion polls as methods to measure opinions about policies. The new media and opinion polls have transformed the political piazza into an electronic type of piazza producing sondocrazia. The latter is a social process in which works the exclusion of almost of people in favour of small different groups that are the only one able to express opinions. In this way, sondocrazia plays an important role in particular in mobilising and managing support for short-term policies. Opinion polls are seen as a continuous electrocardiogram of Public Opinion, one that has influence both on participation and on the role of elected representatives. According to this, sondocrazia splits citizens and voters who contemplate their image projected by various media and make their decisions based on this. In this context, opinion polls become an instrument capable of giving a strong power of building their own references with which the Public Opinion is called to have a confront because is not anymore the means to record opinions. To sum up, if Public Opinion is still the opinions of rational citizens built up in the public sphere on the basis of rational discussion, the relationship between democracy and opinion polls seems to be affected by several factors. In fact, the phenomenon of sondocrazia comes from the change of public sphere using new technology in the era of new media, and influences the mechanism of democracy more than Public Opinion itself. And it is there that I try to address the answer to the main question. References Boullier, D., (1994) "Construire le téléspectateur: récepteur, consommateur ou citoyen?" in A. Vitalis (dir.) Médias et nouvelles technologies - Pour une sociopolitique des usages, Rennes : Editions Apogée, pp Dahl, R., (2006), A preface to democratic theory, Chicago III: University of Chicago Press Gallup, G., (1948), A guide to public opinion polls, Princeton: NJ, Princeton University Press Habermas, J., (1989), The transformation of public sphere: an inquiry into a category of bourgeoisie society, Cambridge: Polity 10

11 Habermas, J., (1996), Between facts and norms: contributions to a discourse theory of law and democracy, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press Lippmann, W., (1922), Public Opinion, Free Press Papacharissi, Z., (2009), The Virtual Sphere 2.0: The Internet, the Public Sphere and beyond in Andrew Chadwick, Routledge handbook of Internet politics, Taylor & Francis Privitera, W., (2001), Sfera pubblica e democratizzazione, Laterza, Roma-Bari Rodota, S., (2004), Tecnopolitica e le nuove tecnologie della comunicazione, Laterza, Roma-Bari 11