Understanding Public Opinion: Theories, Concepts, and Influences
Public Opinion and its Significance
Defining Public Opinion
Public Opinion: The set of views of members of a society on a particular phenomenon.
Public vs. Private Space
Public Space: A place where people should meet to discuss matters pertaining to city government.
Private Space: A monopoly of force has taken a corporate society in any way political, relegating the individual.
Key Thinkers and Their Perspectives
Hobbes
Enshrines the separation of public and private.
Habermas
Thus enabling a public space was the concept of advertising Kant.
Ferry
Public Opinion designates the segment mass of individual opinions expressed in the divided and conflicting interests.
Wolton
Political communication evokes everything that is related to the production and exchange of political speeches that expose the different actors and the media reflect this.
Political Communication
The space in which conflicting discourses exchanged three actors who have the legitimacy to speak publicly on politics, and they are politicians, journalists and public opinion through the polls.
Vincent Price
Public debate refers primarily to a debate between contending political actors, which are broadcast by the media to alert people in the audience to observe and ponder it. (re-election)
Dewey
The most difficult but vital challenge of journalism is to first attract attention and then activate the public.
Analyzing and Measuring Public Opinion
Technical Indicators
Technical indicators for Public Opinion:
- Structured interview
- Content analysis of political platforms
- In-depth interviews
Using Survey Data
Agenda topics, climate or conflict and use of content analysis.
Hyman
To advance the theory of Public Opinion, data are needed over the life of a case.
Understanding Different Group Dynamics
Crowd vs. Public vs. Audience vs. Mass
Crowd (Le Bon): These classes, increasingly press their demands, intensification of the destruction and violence. The crowd is marked by unity of emotional experience. The public is marked by the opposition and rational discourse.
Crowd and Public (Park): The crowd and the public are not formally organized groups. The crowd was developed in response to shared emotions, the public is organized in response to a question.
Audience (Blumer): A group of people who are facing an issue, are divided in their idea of how to approach the issue and address the discussion of the matter.
Mass: Is a set of individuals who are different, independent, anonymous and act in response to their own needs.
Formation of Public Opinion
Foote and Hart collective five stages in the formation of Public Opinion:
- Phase of the problem
- The proposal stage
- Political phase
- Programming phase
- Assessment phase
Types of Publics
The general public, voting public, attentive public and active public.
The Role of Elites and Consensus
Defining the Political Elite
Key: The political elite in a broad sense to include political leaders, government officials, party activists, opinion makers and others who speak and act in political roles.
Almond: The elite is the stratum of the population related to the policy that gives structure to the public.
Public Opinion and Public Policy
Sartori: Public opinion is based on:
- The dissemination to the public
- The reference to public policy
Consensus and its Levels
Consensus: It is a feel whole, which is a common feeling shared.
Level of community consensus: Consensus on a belief about values.
Consensus level scheme: On the rules of procedure.
Consensus at the level of government: Government policy.
Processes of Opinion Formation and Influence
Cascading Decline and Boiling Point
The processes of review are:
- A cascading decline of the elites
- A boiling point of the bottom up identification with reference groups
The Waterfall Model (Deutsch)
- The ideas of economic and social elites
- Political elites and government
- Mass communication network
- Opinion leaders
- Demos, the public reservoir of mass
Boiling Point and Identification
Boiling: The expansion of intellectual profession and its distribution more or less busy in the entire social body, which intensify the views even in small clusters, at ground level.
Identification: The opinions of each individual derived from reference groups, family, religious, ethnic and so on. The ego is an ego that integrates group and with groups in instituting their benchmarks.
Opinion Leaders and Their Influence
Defining Opinion Leaders
Opinion Leader: Are knowledgeable authorities.
Democracy, Totalitarianism, and the Media
Democracy and Freedom of Expression
Democracy: Freedom of thought, the individual is free to control information received in written and oral. Freedom of expression finds its natural continuation in the freedom to organize, to spread what we mean.
Polycentrism: The structure of the media characterizes democracies (approaching the central point), ie multiple centers.
Totalitarian Systems and Control of Information
Totalitarian system:
- The structure of all mass communications is rigidly monocentric, speaks with one voice, that of the scheme.
- All instruments of socialization are also instruments of a single state propaganda.
- The totalitarian world is preserved as a closed world that censors all messages from the world around.
- The totalitarian world is capillary and unnecessarily mobilized, opinion leaders are crushed.
Totalitarianism: Characterized by or wanting to do intrude into the private sphere and destroy it completely.
Direct and Referendary Democracy
Direct democracy: A democracy without representatives and unrepresented, it is also true immediacy of interactions between participants.
Referendary Democracy: A political system in which the demos directly decide individual issues, not as a whole but separately.