Public opinion andThe Pulse of Democracy

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PUBLIC OPINION AND THE PULSE OF DEMOCRACY

Sidney A. Pearson, Jr.

D espite the pervasiveness of modern public opinion polling, or perhaps because of it, there is remark-

ably little consensus about its implications for the theory and practice of democracy. Part of this is no doubt because polling itself is relatively new and it is probably true that its full political implications have yet to be experienced; it is a work still in progress. Whether a more complete experience will be for good or ill is difficult to say with any certainty, but if we can accept the notion that the past is often prologue then a search for the philosophical principles behind opinion polling at its origins may give us some insight into where it is taking us. At this point in time it would seem that any future changes are more likely to be in the realm of technology in opinion sampling and analysis than the political philosophy of public opinion polling per se. And since public opinion polling has become virtually synonymous with George Gallup, it is especially appropriate to look to The Pulse of Democracy (1940) as one of the earliest examples of what the founders of opinion polling thought they were doing. It is Gallup's most sustained argument for the integration of public opinion polling with a modern theory of democracy. To- gether with his younger colleague, Saul Rae, Gallup outlined the essential features of a theory of public opinion polling that have changed remarkably little since the work first appeared. We will not be able to assess fully the later effects of opinion polling on American democracy until we can first begin to grasp the original intentions of these first pollsters. And in the case of George Gallup, it is doubtful if any other single poll in the twentieth century has carried as much weight with both ordinary persons as well as policy makers as the Gallup Poll.

The Pulse of Democracy stands at the threshold of the behavioral revolution in the study of American politics in which opinion polling has played such a singu- larly important role. And although the work as a whole must be considered a collaborative effort between George Gallup and Saul Rae, since their joint authorship on the

title page demands as much, we shall not be off the mark if we speak of The Pulse of Democracy as synonymous with George Gallup and the Gallup Poll. The work as a whole is reflective of the creative spirit of George Gallup and while the argument would be the same regardless of authorship, it would probably be less of a minor classic in American democracy if it did not bear his name. It should be read seriously as one of the paradigmatic works in the behavioral understanding of the role of public opinion polling in the American democracy. Anything less would not do justice to the scope, depth, and implications of modern opinion polling, much less to Gallup's remarkable insight into the role of public opinion polling in the modern definition of democracy. The Pulse of Democracy is more than a defense of public opinion polling, it is also a model for a particular understanding of democracy that may be inseparable from opinion polling itself. It would be appropriate to think of the work as a model for the behavioral theory of democracy.

At times this behavioral science of politics has threat- ened, or sometimes promised, to replace the older tra- ditions of political science often referred to by the new breed of pollsters as "normative" or merely "wisdom" literature, unsupported by empirical facts. On the sur- face, the basic reasons for this attitude are not difficult to fathom. With opinion polling, the science of politics has been able to generate a form of evidently factual information that would not otherwise exist and in the process further to transform that information into a normative power to be reckoned with. Some scholars have thought that this revolution has impoverished the study of American politics by focusing on the trivial that can be quantified at the expense of the significant that cannot be so easily, if at all, quantified - "that it fiddles while Rome burns," as Leo Strauss once put it. But, as Nicholas Eberstadt has also reminded us, "The modern state is an edifice built on numbers." Public opinion polls are part of those numbers and, hence, part of that edifice. We need to come to grips with the importance

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of those numbers and how they have helped to shape of understanding of democracy.

The quantification of knowledge in the form of numbers was a concern to Max Weber long before opinion pollsters arrived on the scene. While Weber did not use the term "behaviorist" to describe himself, the general structure of his work prefigured the behavioral revolution in academia in the mid-1950's and served as the immediate backdrop that made Gallup's work so fresh in the 1940's. He is worth considering here because he was also concerned with the modern state as an edifice built on numbers. A point that was integral to Weber's social science was his insight that the utilization of numbers in modern politics represents a rationalization of modern political life that has roots much deeper than opinion polls themselves. The roots were in the fact- value dichotomy of epistemology that emerged out of Enlightenment rationalism and through it was linked to the rise of modern democratic governments. By contemporary "rat ionalization" of politics what Weber meant in this context was the tendency of modern politics to quantify certain types of information for the purpose of achieving certain specific, short-term goals. This numerical rationalization, he thought, came at the expense of serious thinking about the purpose of government that had previously been the first question of a science of politics. The practical effect of this was the bureaucrat iza t ion of all modern governments that blurred the classical distinctions between different forms of government that were classified not only according to who governed, but to what end they governed. Philo- sophically, it meant that modern political science had abandoned the very idea that different forms of gov- erument were a matter of rational, purposeful inquiry. After all, if all modern governments were merely bu- reaucratic, and all bureaucracies were essentially governed by the same numerical rationality, the classical distinctions based on purposeful ends were not analyti- cally very useful. But this tendency of political science to focus on means while ignoring ends came with a price; the very idea of purposeful ends could not be measured by the new techniques and, hence, could not be rationally discussed. Ends were matters of faith in certain values whereas means were based on scientific facts and could be evaluated dispassionately.

The classical political arguments over the virtues and vices of different forms of government were built on a process of philosophical reasoning that was obscured by the purely instrumental reasoning of quantification. At the deepest levels of political analysis Weber thought that classical reasoning, the sort of reasoning concerned with purpose, tended to be in conflict with the instrumental reasoning, the reasoning about means, that was

embodied in quantification. In the dichotomy between facts and values, which Weber did so much to popularize, facts had precedence over values. In his famous essay "Politics as a Vocation," delivered originally at Munich University in 1918, Weber explicitly denied that the form of government, the modern "state," could be identified in terms of its ends. But the lesson Weber drew from this distinction was that facts were "dead" without some corresponding "value" that was the basis of interpreting facts. The di lemma of Weber's fact- value distinction was that the values themselves were beyond defense in the classical sense because that form of reason itself had broken down. For Weber, values were asserted by charismatic leaders who, in the sense espoused by Nietzsche, were the real builders of political culture. The modern state was thus opened to a new form of demagoguery that was different from the classical understanding of that particular danger. It was more easily described by Weber than defined and Weber had little to offer as a political defense against this demagoguery beyond a view of education that was itself little more than a further advancement of instrumental reasoning. And in any case, the education that Weber himself embodied could only be the preserve of a tiny elite, at best. As such, it was not easily converted into a mass system of education that might be a defense of democracy.

There is little reason to believe that Gallup was personally concerned with these rather abstract tradeoffs in political theorizing, but we should be. Gallup ap- pears to have worked creatively within this received tradition of modern social science and in the process further refined it by linking broad theoretical concepts, such as democracy, to the techniques of information quantification. When Gallup approached the problem of modern democracy in The Pulse of Democracy, he implicitly accepted Weber's notion that modern politics was in danger of becoming "irrational" and some means had to be found to ground democracy on more rational means than had heretofore existed. The sharp separation of fact and value in opinion polling was readily accepted by Gallup, but it did not entail the nihilistic implications for Gallup that it did for Weber. What Gallup wanted very much was to enlist the science of opinion polling in the arsenal of democracy. Democracy was indeed a "value," but it was a value that could be supported by the factual information he was prepared to supply. In working toward this goal, George Gallup helped to construct a behavioral theory of democracy that is integral to the modern American political system. It may be impossible to understand the latter without at least a working knowledge of the ideas of the former. And if the modern state is indeed

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an edifice built on numbers and opinion polling is part of that edifice, it is also true that opinion polling is built on the distinction between facts and values. The art and science of opinion polling, consciously or not, cannot fail to influence our understanding of the nature of American democracy. This was certainly a working assumption behind Gallup's polling. Untangling the commonplace distinction between facts and values, along with the criticisms of this distinction, need not concern us here. What is important is to understand how George Gallup understood the problem and how he sought to redefine the significance of the distinction.

Opinion polling, by its very nature, lends itself to constructing the edifice of a liberal regime that aims to be both liberal and democratic simultaneously. It is liberal in the sense that it tends to assume that all moral judgments, for example, are merely a matter of opinion, and democratic in the sense that all opinions are, or ought to be, somehow equal. The problem of democratic government from this perspective can easily become a problem of transmitting an aggregate public opinion into something we call public policy. Govern- mental institutions, rather than being independent means for directing the affairs of state, are rather conceived more as transmission belts for public opinion. Institu- tions either work well or badly depending on how well they perform their primary function of faithfully trans- forming public opinion into policy. The emphasis is on the instrumental reason that so concerned Weber. What may be lost in the process, however, is a serious understanding of the original purpose of this particular form of popular government. It is clear from reading Gallup that he accepted the democratic nature of American government at face value and concerned himself with what he took to be the more practical question of trans- lating public opinion into public policy. What is at issue in the study of the philosophical roots of opinion polling is not whether the pollsters were sufficiently democratic, which they certainly were, but whether they understood sufficiently the constitutional structure of specifically American democracy such that the polling they did strengthened rather than weakened the constitutional system itself.

We should note at the outset that in the years since Gallup wrote The Pulse of Democracy, this instrumental view of public opinion has become a mainstay of American democratic theory. In 1995, in his Presiden- tial Address upon assuming the position of President of the American Political Science Association, Professor Sidney Verba defended public opinion polling as perhaps the most significant development in promoting the democratization of the American regime. Echoing Gallup, Verba observed that one of the key elements in

the American electoral system was how to deal with the issue of democratic representation. It was central, he thought, to the genetic definition of democracy: "De- mocracy implies responsiveness by governing elites to the needs and preferences of the citizenry. More than that, it implies equal responsiveness; in the democratic ideal, elected officials should give equal consideration to the needs and preferences of all citizens." He said, "it is crucial, therefore, to know how well or how badly the participatory system represents the public to those leaders." The role of opinion polling is that it provides the yardstick by which a more precise measurement of how well democracy is working can be made.

The one opinion that Gallup and subsequent pollsters did not consider open to question was the superi- ority of democratic government over alternative forms. Democracy was generally seen as unproblematic to Gallup, and the central problem of democracy has been not that of defending it but rather of making it work according to its ideal theory. He accepted without compromise the commonplace definition of democracy as a system requiting an active, engaged citizenry committed to determining and seeking the common good. The notion that the common good might be something other than the aggregate opinion of a democratic citizenry was not part of his concern; it was "self-evident" that a democratic citizenry was morally superior to the competing systems emerging at the time he wrote. And considering the urgency with which he wrote The Pulse of Democracy in 1940, under the shadow of Fascist regimes in Germany and Italy and a Communist regime in Russia, his political sympathies and habits cannot be faulted on this score. The political choice Gallup confronted was between liberal democracy on the one hand and several varied but equally appalling totalitarian choices on the other. In a practical sense it is easy to sympathize with this perspective. Gallup was very pro- foundly committed to democracy both as an ideal and in practice. Even in retrospect, with the ideological collapse of Marxist ideology in the Soviet Union in the 1980's and 90's, the choice between liberal democracy and illiberal non-democracies has not been seriously altered. Nevertheless, a clearer understanding of how democratic regimes may be ordered internally and the consequences of those choices remains an ongoing political argument. And the role of opinion polls in defining democracy remains very much open to debate, even among the most dedicated and committed democrats. In this sense, Gallup's defense of democracy through polling in The Pulse of Democracy is best understood as one of the practical choices in contemporary politics. For Gallup and perhaps most pollsters, democracy remains the solution to political tyranny, in whatever


form it takes, and is seldom seen as a problematic form of government in its own right. These evidently practical choices in turn imply a philosophical concept within which the practical issues can be organized, analyzed, and understood in their own right. It is at this philosophical level that Gallup and the broad enterprise of opinion polling needs to be explored in greater depth.

The problems with Gallup's understanding of democracy come to light from a study of how and where he thought opinion polling would fit into the general architecture of the American political system. It is the very focus of The Pulse of Democracy and the very heart of opinion polling as a democratic enterprise. The broad problem is not the technical one of Gallup's 1940 methodology--a stratified sample of the general public built on quota sampling. Quota sampling consisted of constructing a small sample group that matched the demographic profile of a larger group, or "universe," to be studied. His techniques were commonplace among business and advertising firms that had begun to utilize opinion polling as part of their market research since the 1920's. At the time, however, Gallup's methodology was not the overriding issue for most social scientists. The critique of quota sampling and its gradual replacement with modified random sampling techniques are a separate chapter in the evolution of public opinion polling that is perhaps significant in its own right, but does not touch the heart of the link between opinion polling and the evolution of the general theory of democracy that is implicit in polling itself. While Gallup's methodology is routinely dismissed in graduate programs in survey research, his democratic philosophy and, with it, the place of public opinion analysis, are seldom questioned. The reason is that what drives opinion polling is determined more by its underlying rationale in a kind of instrumental reasoning than by simple technique. The logic determines the technique, rather than the other way around, and the logic in turn helps to crystallize our conception of what is meant by the very idea of democracy. We can best appreciate the revolution in Gallup's arguments for opinion polling if we place them alongside the constitutional system of the American Founders and where they thought public opinion fit into a popular form of government.

Democracy and Public Opinion We can use founding arguments as a benchmark for

the role of public opinion in our constitutional system because the principles at issue are best seen by comparing their origin with their subsequent development. The Federalist and Anti-Federalist debates over the Consti- tution remain the most sustained and forceful debates over the principles of the original Constitution. This

was a debate over the very meaning and definition of democratic government at the founding of what has properly been called "the first new nation." And because the Founders of the American regime designed the Constitution as a popular form of government, we can see in it the modern origins of democratic public opinion. Further, the problem of how and where to place public opinion in a democracy begins here because the way the Founders understood public opinion was significantly different from the way in which modern opinion polling implicitly situates public opinion in democratic theory. The argument in The Federalist may be viewed as an argument about public opinion in a popular form of government that is founded on specifically republican principles as the Founders understood those terms. The issue was not whether public opinion would be the basis for the American regime; after all, the Dec- laration of Independence had boldly announced as a self-evident Truth that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Did this mean that active consent was an operative principle of popular government on a continuous basis, or merely a one time only principle of how governments are founded? It was a question that was implicit throughout the founding debates.

The Founders favored a representative democracy over a participatory democracy because they made a sharp distinction between the momentary popular will of the people and reasoned deliberation. Public opinion expressed through representatives rather than expressed directly by the people helped to create a constitutional space between citizens and their government. The space was essential for both government and the public. It was necessary to detach government from public passion in order to give representatives time to deliberate about the common good. The Founders well understood that no popular form of government could be detached for very long from the public, but representation gave reason at least a chance to prevail over passion. This was conspicuously true in presidential selection, for example. Hamilton noted in Federalist 71, "It is a just observation, that the people commonly intend the public good. This often applies to their very errors. But their good sense would despise the adulator, who should pretend that they always reason right about the means of promoting it." The context is the duration in office, but the clear implica- tion is the necessity of creating a constitutional space between elected officials and the electorate. The indi- rect means of selecting a president, through the Elec- toral College, was intended, among other things, to protect the office from the bane of classical democratic theory, that of demagoguery.

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The problem of demagoguery was more easily defined conceptually than identified in a specific circum- stance. But the difficulty involved in precise definition did not mean that it was merely an abstract, theoretical problem of essentially philosophical speculation. It was very much a practical problem of democracy--perhaps the problem of democracy as the Founders understood democracy. Demagoguery was at the heart of the Founders' critique of classical democracy. Direct participation in the classical democratic tradition meant the absence of any space between the many and the ruler. The passions of the many were directly and im- mediately felt by the leader. In Madison's justly famous phrase in Federalist 55, "Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates; every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob." And because "Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm" of state, auxiliary precautions are necessary to check the natural tendency of popular government toward demagoguery. These additional precautions included a series of republican principles designed to increase that constitutional space the Founders believed so essential to the preservation of liberty: a repubfic extended over a large geographic area, the separation of powers, and political representation.

Each of these principles was part of the "new science of politics" described by Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 9. It is not necessary here to elaborate further the implications of each of these principles sepa- rately. It is sufficient to note that each element of the new science was explicitly designed to create political space between public opinion and the operation of government. In the case of federalism in the extended republic, the space was geographical as well as political. Further, the federal principle made representation a necessity as well as a sound political principle. If the entire area of the United States was to be incorporated into a single government, representation was an ines- capable feature of it. This basic fact of political life could be avoided only by multiplying small republics throughout North America - a prospect that Madison and Hamilton regarded with considerable alarm because they thought it would both invite foreign intervention and, inevitably, lead to constant conflicts among the different small republics, much as had been the history of ancient Greece or Renaissance Italy.

The problem of majority tyranny received particularly careful attention in Federalist 10. The problem of popular government, as Madison saw it, was how to control the violence of faction without doing injury to the principles of free republican government. Since the origins of factions formed around different opinions were sown in human nature, Madison discounted moral education as the sole means of controlling their effects.

It was most tikely to be absent when most needed, and, in any case, would be inevitably overwhelmed by vari- ous passions in any contest between reason and passion. In order for reason to have a fighting chance to prevail it needed time which could only be provided by the form of government itself. Opinion in a popular form of government was typically divided into majorities and minorities. The idea behind the extended republic was to help the formation of natural differences of opinion by dividing the regime as a whole into as many distinct factions as possible. Communities would form around the different factions, but the mode of selection and the means by which representatives would have to combine at the national level to exercise power would help to check the formation of national majorities. When national majorities were formed, as they would need to be on issues of national importance, it would tend to be through a process of coalition-build- ing among multiple minority factions. All majorities would tend to be temporary and transient at best. And, since "enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm" of the ship of state, the institutional arrangements would also tend to dampen the incentives for demagoguery while providing ample room for republican leadership.

The Anti-Federalists were both skeptical and suspi- cious of a national government precisely because it cre- ated too much space between the governed and the government. Opposition to the proposed Constitution took a number of paths, but Brutus, writing in opposition in New York and quoting Montesquieu, observed that in a small republic "the interest of the public is easier perceived, better understood, and more within the reach of every citizen." For the Anti-Federalists, the creation of political space between the people and the government was a source of corruption. Their preference for a more direct, participatory democracy was rooted in their general fear that representation would foster aristocracy at best and oligarchy at worst. They were generally less concerned about demagoguery than they were about tyranny from the very nature of representation itself. In this they characteristically took their philosophical bearings from the classical republicans in general and Montesquieu in particular. And their earlier experience with monarchy in its English form served as a practical source of wisdom that reinforced their philosophy.

But Montesquieu was a double-edged sword in the founding arguments over popular government. In the same work cited approvingly by Brutus, The Spirit of the Laws, he also wrote that the principle of democracy is corrupted when the spirit of extreme equality is taken up: "Therefore, democracy has to avoid two excesses:


the spirit of inequality, which leads it to aristocracy or to the government of one alone, and the spirit of extreme equality, which leads it to the despotism of one alone, as the despotism of one alone ends by conquest." It was in the nature of demagoguery to appeal directly to popular passion. In effect, the demagogue was at war with the constitutional space between government and people that was part of the Founders' constitutional design. Montesquieu counseled moderation in the sense of an Aristotelian mean between these twin dangers, and the American Founders echoed his concerns in their constitutional design. Their pragmatic answer was a separation of powers, federalism, and a system of representation that would try to overcome defects of personal virtue with institutional arrangements.

The fundamental idea of representation in the republican political philosophy of the Founders was the notion that representation would act to refine and enlarge public opinion and not merely reflect it raw and undigested. Informed opinion was superior to unin- formed opinion, and informed opinion emerges from deliberation more often than from passion. The Founders did not regard all opinion as equal, but rather regarded opinions formed after deliberation as superior to opinions existent prior to such deliberation. "In a nation of philosophers" Madison wrote in Federalist 49, it would not be necessary to worry about demagoguery: "But a nation of philosophers is as little to be expected as the philosophical race of kings wished for by Plato. And in every other nation, the most rational government will not find it a superfluous advan- tage, to have the prejudices of the community on its side."

Classical democracy had relied entirely on virtue alone to stem the tides of popular passions. But the new science fundamentally doubted the possibility of insti- tutionalizing such virtue and instead relied on what Madison called "auxiliary precautions" to help preserve a government based on reason and not passion. He went on to critique direct appeals to the public by elected officials in Federalist 49 because "The passion therefore not the reason, of the public, would sit in judg- ment. But it is the reason of the public alone that ought to control and regulate the government." Direct democracy was an invitation to demagoguery. The public could not be expected to have a prior knowledge on every policy issue and the best representatives, even under the best of circumstances, would always have a strong incentive to simplify the presentation to the point of distortion. In the hands of less scrupulous individuals, the distortion would be both deliberate and inflamma- tory. This classic problem required a modern solution in the form of institutional arrangements: political space

between the consent of the governed and the representatives acting on behalf of their constituents. The Con- stitution was explicitly designed not to require constant and active participation of public opinion to make popular government work.

Democracy was problematic because public opinion was problematic in the Founders' understanding of popular government. Unfettered public opinion was less the solution to the problem of just government than a problem in its own right that first needed to be chan- neled toward a reasoned moderation in action. Delib- eration on public matters had to take place somewhere in any system of government that was to avoid the rule of passion over reason. The Founders rejected participatory democracy in favor of a representative democracy in large part because they understood that deliberation required both time and relative detachment. Participatory democracy placed deliberation with the people rather than their elected representatives, and it placed it at the mercy of a public opinion that typically lacked both the time and the detachment necessary to make reasoned judgments.

Public opinion was of mixed virtue and vice in the new science of politics at the American founding. On the one hand it was the only legitimate basis of just government, at least in the form of consent, whether active or passive consent. On the other hand, few among the founding generation believed that the voice of the people was the voice of God. Whether public opinion worked good or evil on the character of the American regime would depend, ultimately, on the virtue of the people themselves. Here the Founders were in partial agreement with the classical science of politics; virtue was the ultimate basis of whatever justice was to be found in civil society, even if it needed a few "auxiliary precautions." As Madison put it at the conclusion to Federalist 55, "As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circum- spection and distrust: So there are other qualities in human nature, which justify a certain portion of es- teem and confidence. Republican government presup- poses the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form." The nature of the regime was dependent on both the institutional arrangements of the Constitution and the moral behavior of the American people. It required both of these to make it work as planned. Either alone would, in the final analysis, be insufficient because neither alone could bear the full weight of preserving a just polity.

It is important to stress Madison's emphasis on civic virtue in public opinion because it is too easily over- looked amid the larger discussion of the benefits of the separation of powers in the new science of politics.

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Citizens were neither "angels" nor were they "beasts"; they were a mixture of good and evil, and for that very reason "auxiliary precautions" were necessary to en- sure a just regime. But the auxiliary precautions were not a substitute for the civic virtue of public opinion; they were rather intended to give virtue time to develop and assert itself. Virtue is often in need of allies, and time, the Founders thought, was one of the chief allies. Constitutional space provided that time and complemented its effects, allowing the representatives also to exercise and to demonstrate the republican virtue necessary for regime maintenance. One of the dilemmas of participatory democracy was that it tended to make the virtue found in public opinion alone to be the sole defense of a just form of democracy. The solution to the classical problem of democracy, if "solution" is the right word in this context, was not to un- shackle public opinion, but to refine and enlarge its natural orbit of passion and parochial interest. The reason of the public emerged out of a combination of civic virtue and institutional arrangements.

What is not clear in The Federalist is an answer to the most obvious question that arises at this point: Pre- cisely what are the sources of republican virtue in public opinion that was the final guard against demagoguery and democratic corruption? But if the authors of The Federalist were uncertain or ambiguous about the sources of republican virtue, many of their most ardent supporters as well as opponents were more certain of the sources of virtue. David Ramsay, a passionate sup- porter of both popular government and the Constitu- tion, in his The History of the American Revolution (1789), was unequivocal on the sources of republican virtue and he echoed the sentiment of no doubt most of his fellow countrymen; "Remember that there can be no political happiness without liberty; that there can be no liberty without morality; and that there can be no morality without religion." Most of the Founders would have agreed with Ramsay at least to the extent that public opinion had to be virtuous in order to make a popular form of government work. What Ramsay pinpointed with regard to public opinion at the time of the founding was what he took to be the truth of the matter, a self-evident truth, that the republican political science of The Federalist, for example, was a modern super- structure built on the foundation of a thoroughly Prot- estant social culture. It was, he thought, the Achilles' heel of the republican experiment to found the government on official indifference to the religious culture of the citizens themselves. Whatever private reservations the authors of the Constitution may have had about organized religion, they were fully aware of the overwhelming public sentiment on the sources of morality

and the link between private morality and public virtue.

The link Ramsay drew between public opinion and the political principles of the regime, which seemed both reasonable and reasonably obvious at the time, was clearly shared by most of the Founders. There is a tendency among historians at later dates to forget that these debates over established religion versus established freedom were also debates over the sources of public virtue and were not merely matters of private con- science. The Constitution attempted to resolve the religious problem in politics by making religious freedom the governing principle in disputes over religious preference. It did so because most of the Founders regarded religious principles as matters of opinion rather than factual knowledge. But it did so at the cost of remain- ing silent on the sources of citizen virtue. In the process it elevated the instrumental reasoning of political prudence over that of final purpose. It made institutional arrangements, such as federalism, representation, and the separation of powers, the only constitutional means of regime maintenance. Everyone knew that the new science of republican politics would not work unless the citizens were sufficiently virtuous but, unable to resolve the conflicting argument, they chose official silence on the matter as perhaps the most practical solution. It is significant, but not entirely surprising, that the Constitution is written almost entirely in the language of institutional arrangements; it was the language of modern republican political science. That the Con- stitution is devoid of any classical references to the means by which citizens would receive their moral education merely serves as a reminder both of the break the Founders made with the classical tradition and how much of that tradition they took for granted in their edifice. It should not be interpreted to mean either that they were indifferent to the problem or that they suc- cessfully resolved it.

The procedural neutrality of the Constitution with respect to the moral formation of republican citizens did not long survive closer scrutiny by the Founders themselves. They soon realized that the lack of any specific institutional device to educate public opinion could indeed prove to be the Achilles Heel of their political experiment. The extensive effort many of them devoted to public education in the immediate decades that fol- lowed the ratification of the Constitution is testimony in itself to their awareness of the enormous stakes involved. Nevertheless, several points need to be made with regard the Founders' political science. First, constitutional silence on the sources of citizen virtue meant that such education would not ultimately find sanction in the Constitution itself. Over time, the matter was


resolved for most persons as a practical compromise involving locally controlled public school systems and widespread religious education that usually supported the constitutional principles of the regime. Second, the very understandable constitutional silence on the moral basis of public opinion was itself a potentially danger- ous vacuum. It was a silence later given eloquent voice by Abraham Lincoln in his Lyceum address in 1838. Popular government in the new science needed more than institutional arrangements to make it work. So long as the institutional arrangements enjoyed broad public support, direct appeals to public opinion would not necessarily jeopardize the Constitution. But a problem would and could arise if a means were found to appeal directly to public opinion and if public opinion itself lacked the virtue necessary to make popular government work. At that point demagoguery could reappear in new forms with a weakened institutional means of resistance, especially if the important distinctions between representative and participatory democracy were somehow lost.

Gallup and Democratic Theory When George Gallup defended public opinion poll-

ing as part of a progressive improvement to the working of American democracy he did so in the wake of the Progressive assault on the founding principles, framed in large part by work such as Woodrow Wilson's Congressional Government (1885), Charles Beard's An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913 ), and Herbert Croly's Progressive Democ- racy (1914), among others. It was a critique based in large part on a participatory theory of true democracy that doubted the Founders' fundamental commitment to democracy as a form of government. This necessarily implied a critique of the Constitution as the em- bodiment of the Founders' science of politics. Repre- sentative democracy in the Founding tradition, at least as the Progressives interpreted it, meant federalism, the separation of powers, and the primacy of local communities over the national community. Participation was not merely one element in this critique, it was one of the defining elements of the Progressive definition of democracy. Indeed, citizen participation, combined with scientific public administration, was typically viewed as the basis of democratic reform. But it was not simply an update of the Anti-Federalist argument. In the Progressive era, mass participation was intended to be in the service of the national community as opposed to local communities.

Gallup's personal background was in applied psychology and there is no evidence that he was a serious student of the political philosophy of the Progressive

Movement. But his arguments on the role of opinion polling in a democracy were consistent with the general thrust of the Progressives. The major difference was that whereas most of the Progressives had regarded the Founders as anti-democratic and essentially elitist, Gallup regarded them more respectfully. The Progres- sive argument was essentially that movement of the American regime toward democracy would necessarily move it away from its founding principles and, hence, the Constitution in its original understanding. George Gallup, on the other hand, defended opinion polling on the grounds that it would enable Americans to complete the democratic project begun, but never completed, by the original Founders. It was a more optimistic and less condescending argument than that of the Progressives generally, if less deep or tren- chant. Gallup did not see polling as replacing the Constitution as much as he saw polls perfecting the document in both theory and practice. But to further Progressive reforms without the Progressive critique left Gallup's argument open to internal contradictions that have remained endemic in the democratic assumptions of opinion polling.

The theoretical failure of the Founders, at least in Gallup's view, was not that they were elitists or that they opposed democracy per se, though he did ascribe to this general Progressive view, but rather that the tools necessary to implement true democracy in an extended republic were technically unavailable at the time of the founding. The defenders of what Madison called a "pure democracy" were unable to refute the practical claim that participatory democracy was impossible in any territory as large as the United States. Madison had, of course, critiqued participatory democracy on both practical as well as philosophical grounds, but Gallup fo- cused on the practical objections that he thought to be decisive. What Gallup brought to his work was a theory of democracy that blended James Bryce's famous work The American Commonwealth (1888) with his own work in opinion polling. What he learned from Bryce was the notion that modern democracy had developed through three distinct stages to date and was prevented from developing into the fourth and final stage only by the inadequacy of a technical means of discovering true public opinion. Gallup believed that final stage had at last arrived, or was at least immanent and he described it in The Pulse of Democracy as "The Voices of the People." Gallup did not conceptually add to Bryce's theory of democracy, but he did add opinion polls as the technical means that would complete Bryce's theory. It is necessary to briefly outline Bryce's theory of democratic development here in order to understand Gallup's underlying argument as well.


It was Bryce's thesis that democracy developed through distinct stages, with each stage defined by how public opinion was articulated in regime principles. The first and second stages of public opinion as the basis for government he described in outline as evolving from what he called "unconscious and passive into its con- scious and active condition." In other words, the first form of democratic government is one in which public opinion is philosophically acknowledged as the basis of government but is not yet the basis in reality. It may be described as democracy in theory, such as the social contract theory that informed the American Founders. The American Founders belong to the second stage of democratic development; the transition of theory to practice lay in their recognition that all just government rests on the consent of the governed and in their adoption of a Constitution built on that bedrock principle. The third stage grew naturally out of the second stage; it is the stage of active opinion in which the will of the public is expressed through the ballot box in the form of periodic elections. But the third stage remains incomplete because of the very nature of voting itself. "Bringing men to the polls", Bryce wrote, "is like passing a steam roller over stones newly laid on a road; the angularities are pressed down, and the appearance of smooth and even uniformity is given which did not exist before." The act of voting necessarily reduces the psychological complexity of public opinion to a merely represented form in a party or individual that effec- tively distorts what we commonly call "public opinion." From this observation it follows that any representation of public opinion must inevitably be a distortion of public opinion and, therefore, an imperfect form of democracy itself. In Bryce's view, and it was one that Gallup shared, neither elections nor popular referendum could adequately solve the problem of participatory democracy in an extended republic. Any resolution would have to be in the realm of pure theory, much like Plato's "city in speech"; analogously it could only be described and then applied as a permanent re- buke to real regimes that presumed to call themselves democracies.

According to Bryce, a fourth, and presumably final, stage of democracy could be reached "if the will of the majority of the citizens were to become ascertainable at all times, and without the need of passing through a body of representatives, possibly without the need of voting machinery at all." In 1992 and 1996 the same argument would find popular voice in a third party can- didate for president, H. Ross Perot. The rule of public opinion under such circumstances would be more complete and continuous than had been experienced by any existing regime until that time. Popular sovereignty

would then be pushed to its logical limit and could dispense with the "legal modes in which the majority speaks its will in the voting booths." The problem with this fourth stage, and the reason why it must remain hypo- thetical, like Plato's city in speech, was that Bryce could not see how what he called the "mechanical" hurdles could be overcome. As he put it, "the machinery for weighing and measuring the popular will from week to week or month to month has not been, and is not likely to be, invented." Governments may in fact behave as if public opinion continually acts on legislation, but it will be essentially a matter of guesswork at best. The representation of public opinion is an imperfect compromise with the reality of imperfect knowledge of that same opinion.

Gallup agreed with the general thrust of Bryce's understanding of how democracy progresses through successive stages, as witness his extensive discussion in Chapter Nine, "The Fourth Stage of Democracy." But he added to it the conviction that the science of public opinion polling had reached the point that it could be midwife to the fourth and final stage of democracy. The key in this endeavor was "science" in opinion polling. When Gallup surveyed the status of opinion polling as it had developed in the 1920's and 30's, especially in popular consciousness, he could not help but be struck by the gap between academic and business polling, which was based on science, and most journal- istic polling, which was impressionistic and biased at best. It is not necessary here to rehearse the full story behind The Literary Digest fiasco in the 1936 presidential election. Gallup gives a good discussion of the story and the story behind the story in Chapter Four of The Pulse of Democracy, entitled "The Lessons of 1936." What is sufficient to note for our purposes is that Gallup accurately predicted Franklin Roosevelt as the winner before the actual election whereas The Literary Digest had ignominiously predicted the victory of All Landon, whose loss was, at that time, the greatest landslide de- feat in American history. The Literary Digest folded shortly thereafter, in large part because of the consequences of its prediction, and achieved a folklore status for the all-time fiasco of public opinion polling. Gallup's "scientific poll" had itself become one of the major stories in conjunction with the 1936 election and over- night made his work virtually synonymous with public opinion polling. What Gallup and Rae accomplished in The Pulse of Democracy was to popularize arguments on the worth and scientific nature of properly conducted polling that may have otherwise gone unnoticed by the general public.

While many of his peers who were also engaged in mass polling came to criticize the specific polling tech-


niques used by the Gallup organization in its early polling, few criticized either his notion that polling was "science," properly understood, or his linkage of polling with the perfection of American democracy. We can therefore omit a technical discussion of his original polling techniques, which have been routinely dismissed in graduate seminars for generations, and focus on the political argument in The Pulse of Democracy. The general movement toward modified random sampling techniques in opinion polling may be considered in the cat- egory of technical modifications and improvements in the field. They constitute the sort of incremental improvements in the field that have changed the conduct of opinion polling beyond what Gallup may have imagined in 1940. But they have not affected the substance of his democratic theory.

Polling and the Democratic Argument In 1940 it was far from obvious that the future would

be marked by a democracy triumphant. Gallup and Rae saw their work as integral to an earnest and pressing need to defend fundamental democracy against the twin threats of Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism. The passage of time has not dimmed the profound grandeur of their ultimate concern, and they stated it with a characteristic boldness in the opening chapter: "Throughout the history of politics this central problem has remained: shall the common people be flee to express their basic needs and purposes, or shall they be dominated by a small ruling clique? Shall the goal be the free expres- sion of public opinion, or shall efforts be made to en- sure its repression? In a democratic community, the at- titudes of the mass of people determine policy~ABut public opinion is also important in the totalitarian state. Contemporary dictators must inevitably run through the minds of their people - otherwise they would quickly dispense with their elaborate propaganda machines."

From this challenge to democracy "spring two fundamental questions to which the answer must be given. Is democracy really inferior to dictatorship ? Can democracy develop new techniques to meet the impact of this strange new decade? Such questions are not academic." The promise of opinion polling was that they would answer, unequivocally, "yes" to both questions. Opinion polls in the wake of the 1936 election have "demonstrated by their accuracy that public opinion can be measured; there is a growing conviction that public opinion must be measured." Opinion polling had, in Gallup's opinion, reached the point whereby it was ready to move democracy into the fourth stage of Bryce's conception of democratic development. Scientific sampling of public opinion would provide precisely the "machinery" necessary for measuring opinion on a daily

basis, if desired. What Gallup called "the tempo of the swift moving age" demanded "continuous and rapid measurements of public opinion at all times." Further- more, polling could provide such measurement within an incredibly broad context of psychological complexity that avoided what both he and Bryce saw as the artificial uniformity of public opinion compressed into voting "yes" or "no" in ordinary elections and referen- dums. And, finally, scientific polling could avoid the misrepresentation of public opinion, such as occurred with The Literary Digest poll, based on unscientific methodology.

The verification of polling accuracy, according to Gallup, would be the final election results themselves. "The final election result is the mark at which public opinion polls must shoot, because this is the only ob- jective basis on which the general public can verify the accuracy of competing estimates." The selection of this particular benchmark is both curious and instructive. Both Gallup and Rae were well aware that there was more to opinion polling than predicting election results, but the lessons of 1936 were still the reference point from which modern polling must take its bearings. If the public could learn to trust election predic- tions, they would also trust other polling results. Fur- ther, elections were the ultimate democratic standard for Gallup because the existing political process had been corrupted by political parties, politicians, and "hack" journalists. In what he vividly described as "air- ing the smoke filled rooms" of party nominating con- ventions, public opinion was routinely ignored in favor of the opinion of a handful of party elites. And the elections themselves were always subject to the suspect interpretations either of journalists who were merely guessing at public opinion, or of self-serving politicians who had strong incentives to deliberately misinterpret its direction, saliency, and intensity. Without polling, even the best-intentioned individuals could only make guesses that were by their very nature unverifi- able. Making elections the benchmark was the only way in a democracy that the public could independently know that the polls were not "rigged," as many of the critics of polling had alleged.

Although Gallup's strictly political polling was often piggy-backed onto his commercial polling, rather than conducted in separate and distinct polls, one cannot help but be struck by the singleness of purpose that animated Gallup's commitment to democracy as he understood it. It was this singleness of purpose, aimed at a "true picture" of public opinion, that gives to The Pulse of Democracy its almost missionary flavor. The emerging science of polling was more than a business profession, it was a profession in service to democracy.


Further, it was consistent with the liberal-democratic idealism that infused so much of the New Deal. The creation of the welfare state under Franklin Roosevelt was predicated on the notion that national legislation should facilitate national planning. Whereas many Progressives saw in the pro-business legislation of an earlier era the product of a constitutional defect that was essentially elitist in origin, Gallup, on the other hand, often saw it as a defect of knowledge by representatives. Polls were to be the link between the public and popular government in a way that elected representatives could not hope to match. "The polls can help to indicate where the pulse of democracy is faint and uncertain, and, by so doing, point to the need for ap- plying restoratives which will strengthen that pulse."

The key to the linkage between public policy and public opinion in this theory of democracy was, of course, the accuracy of the polling enterprise as well as the general level of citizen knowledge of the issues being polled. Accuracy was widely understood to be a technical problem that Gallup and Rae clearly believed was rapidly being resolved. The general level of citizen knowledge, on the other hand, was a more complex problem. It is indicative of how Gallup had linked opinion polling to his explicit understanding of democracy that he took this issue more seriously than many later pollsters. Gallup explicitly understood that his conception of democracy rested on an informed and active citizenry. He accepted at the outset the fact that citizens could not be expected to have specific knowledge about every public issue. Walter Lippmann was correct to point out that the world is simply too complex for anyone to have more than a series of mental images that may or may not correspond to the world outside of those images. But for Gallup this recognition was not a reason to abandon this notion of participatory democracy so much as an opportunity to change its very basis. "The job of mapping the areas of ignorance is every bit as important as mapping the areas of specialized knowledge, for both elements go to make up the conglomerate which is public opinion."

Citizen ignorance was not viewed as a reason to re- ject participatory democracy, but rather was seen as a call to arms for serious democrats. Since the maintenance of democracy for Gallup was almost entirely a matter of public opinion, weaknesses in public opinion were treated as a clarion call to educate citizens. The authors matter-of-factly noted that "public opinion can play its part only if the common people are continually encouraged to take an interest in the broad outlines of public policy, in their own opinions, and in those of their fellows, and if clear channels exist through which those opinions can become known." Precisely who are

these educators and who would educate the educators is not discussed in The Pulse of Democracy. Gallup evidently assumed that accurate information would somehow win-out over inaccurate information in any fair contest and the duty of the true democrats was to en- sure that accurate information was always available. What is striking in this regard is the absence of any reference to the Constitution as an ordering principle in the American political system. This is not because Gallup embodied the Progressive's disdain for the founding principles of the document. Rather, it seems to be the case that he saw no inherent conflict between the direct rule of public opinion on public policy--the logic of popular sovereignty--and the logic of a constitutional system built on the principle of representation. Since Gallup viewed the representative system as corrupted by political parties, self-serving representatives, and the imperfect reading of public opinion from elections alone, it meant the deliberation on public issues would have to depend on an informed public. Further- more, while it was clear that the technical tools for the creation of a national democratic were now at hand, citizen ignorance was a stumbling block.

The ignorance of citizens was a stumbling block to Gallup for reasons that deserve further comment because they go to the heart of the problem of direct or participatory democracy. To his credit, he was more forthright in confronting the problem than were many subsequent pollsters who have also dealt with the issue. He was well aware that polling had the effect of col- lapsing the political space between citizens and their government as a whole. He did not view this as a weak- ness, but rather as en emerging strength of democracy. At the same time, Gallup was also aware that a more direct democracy did place the full weight of maintaining a decent form of government on public opinion alone. This meant that he had to revisit the problem of demagoguery that the Founders had so much feared. Citing the treatment of democracies by "Publius" in Federalist 10 as "spectacles of turbulence and conten- tion," Gallup observed that "this case against government by public opinion reveals suspicion not only of the public-opinion surveys, but also against the mass of the people." It is the argument of "an eighteenth century conservative who feared the dangers of 'too much democracy,'" and, carried into the present day, represents a spirit hostile to the modern completion of the fourth stage of democratic development. In Gallup's view, the Founders' concern with democratic tyranny was very much exaggerated in the eighteenth century and was even less likely to be valid in the twentieth century. Because Gallup did not have the Founders' understanding of the classical problems of democracy--


the danger of passion overwhelming reason and giving rise to demagoguery--he could not appreciate the Founders' concern with these problems. To be concerned with the dangers of democracy was to betray a lack of faith in democracy itself. Democracy was less of a problem for Gallup than a solution to political problems.

A point Gallup shared with most Progressives was the notion that bringing public opinion into greater congruency with public policy was not a generic problem of democratic theory and practice but rather the solution to the problem. The democratic thesis in The Pulse of Democracy consciously attacked the notion of political deliberation as a function of elected representatives. The function of representatives was to provide a more or less "expert" political knowledge of the most efficient means by which democratic wants and needs, revealed by opinion polls, would be translated into policy. The elites who occupied positions of authority could not be presumed to possess a greater knowledge than the common man of what the ends of government should be. To believe otherwise would open the door to the sort of demagoguery experienced in Nazi Ger- many or Soviet Russia. The democratic problem was to strike a balance between elites and masses that had broken down elsewhere. Each had a proper place in the political scheme of things and the critical element in the preservation of democracy was to give proper weight to each. Elected representatives would still be needed to implement policy objectives, but polling would redefine their role. Their function was not to "refine and enlarge" public opinion, but rather to translate it effi- ciently into action. Implicitly, a representative was not an independent actor in the political process, but rather something of an instructed delegate, albeit with clearer instrnctions, thanks to public opinion polling, than would have been possible in earlier times.

Accurate opinion polling would help to discipline elected officials by depriving them of both the incentive and the opportunity to misinterpret true public opinion. The more accurate polls become, they reasoned, the more elected representatives would become dependent on polls for their instructions regarding what actions they should take on the great issues of the day. "The democratic idea implies awareness that the people can be wrong," the authors freely concede. Polls do not by themselves determine what people will think - they are, at this level, merely a seismograph that regis- ters opinions that are ultimately formed elsewhere. But the tyranny of the majority has never been the most serious threat to American democracy. "The real tyranny in America will not come from a better knowledge of how majorities feel about the questions of the day which press for solution. Tyranny comes from

ignorance...(and)...arises when the media of information are closed." Polling is posited on the belief, Gallup noted, "that political institutions are not perfect, that they must be modified to meet changing conditions, and that a new age demands new political techniques."

The Political Science of Opinion Polling The democratic theory that is explicit in The Pulse

of Democracy is older than public opinion polling. It is in this context that Gallup's work should be read as one of the latest in a series of arguments for participatory democracy that reach back beyond even the American founding. But the salient characteristics of opinion polling have combined with this democratic theory to help produce a particularly modern hybrid of participatory democracy. It is this hybrid theory of participatory democracy that most attracts our attention in Gallup and in the democratic theory implicit in opinion polling. It is a virtue of The Pulse of Democracy that we can read it as one of a handful of works that have explicitly attempted to link opinion polling with this particular theory of democracy. It is not clear that Gallup has escaped the classical dilemmas of public opinion in participatory democracy, but it is equally clear that opinion polling has put a new edge on these arguments. In order to understand better the revolution in democratic theory for which Gallup served as a kind of midwife we should return to the twin pillars of his democratic assumptions; the accuracy of opinion polling itself and the notion that democracy can be defined as the transmission of public opinion directly into public law and policy.

In Gallup's view, accuracy was the least important part of the polling equation, at least in the sense that he was personally convinced that pollsters had conceptually solved the riddle of accuracy. He was well aware that polling results were typically expressed in terms of the probability of error, but that this probability could be rationally calculated so that even error was made to behave rationally. Still, the most salient technical problem with polling has always been the accuracy of the sample itself, including the accuracy of interpretation of the numbers generated by the poll. The improvements in technique since Gatlup wrote The Pulse of Democracy are genuine enough, but even with these improvements technical problems remain. Few pollsters are likely to repeat the mistakes of sampling error in the infamous Literary Digest fiasco. And whatever may be the case with the public as a whole, most pro- fessional pollsters are familiar with the problems of interpretation of polling results. It is quite clear, for example, that relatively slight modifications in question wording can produce dramatically different poll

68 SOCIETY* �9 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2004

responses; different polls have found that the percent- age of people who agree that too little money is being spent on "welfare" is about 19%, whereas the percent- age of people who think too little money is being spent on "assistance to the poor" is about 63%. Interpretive questions of this sort do not necessarily pose insur- mountable problems in opinion polling and presumably can be overcome as pollsters become increasingly sensitive to these sorts of problems. But accurate or in- sightful interpretations are philosophic virtues that exist apart from the polling data itself. Public opinion can be an extraordinarily complex thing, even on seemingly simple and straight forward issues like "welfare" and "assistance to the poor". But to say only this about public opinion is to say what the Founders already knew.

The uncertainty in the interpretation of numbers is a significant element in the evolution of opinion polling. The numbers that are attributed to "welfare" and "assistance to the poor," for example, are uniquely dependent upon the "values" implicit in the different ques- t ions. Gal lup be l ieved that pol l ing had brought democracy to the brink of Bryce's fourth stage of development because he thought polling could provide factually accurate data on the pulse of democracy. It was the primary pillar on which Gallup built his general argument. As with most pollsters generally, he took it for granted that the numerical representation of opinion reduced opinions on the same question to a homogeneous quality. What subtle differences in question wording suggest, however, is the supposition that opinions are far more heterogeneous than the raw numbers can ever reveal. As Martin Diamond observed in this regard, "The content of the opinion, its accuracy and sense regarding the ethical or political problem to which it is a response, has zero consequence for the process of opinion formation." Even the most complex and sophisticated polls may be no more representative of citizen opinion than an astute, elected politician.

But uncertainty in numbers is more than a technical problem. Reasonable certainty, within the probability of error, was a central concern to Gallup. It was this certainty that had opened the door to Bryce's fourth stage of democratic evolution. If the accuracy of the numbers is called into question, the corresponding belief that facts are distinct from values and that they are genuinely representative of the national community is also rendered problematic. The analytic power of pollsters to gauge public opinion through statistical manipulation is complicated. Even the most sophisticated pollsters have been surprised on more than one occa- sion by the origins, development, and outcome of issues as they have been tracked through opinion polls. Even if we have reasonably accurate polls on issues

that range from civil rights to abortion to weekly church attendance, we still do not know from the polls what, if anything, laws and public policy should be on these facts.

At one level most serious pollsters since Gallup and Rae wrote have become very sensitive to this issue and it is scarcely foreign territory to them. The more serious problem has been the tendency of opinion polling to increase its efforts to explain the complexity of attitude formation in something resembling psychological terms rather than an analysis of the truth or falsity of the recorded opinions themselves. The growing real- ization that the fact-value dichotomy may be a false one has not in itself stimulated very much interest in the analysis of the truth or falsity of what is recorded as public opinion itself. And to be fair, that was not the purpose of Gallup's work. He simply took it for granted at the time that American public opinion was a bulwark against the totalitarian ideologies of Fascism and Com- munism. But this in turn amounts to an implicit recognition that the virtue of the regime rests ultimately on a virtuous citizenry - the same point Madison made central to Federal is t 55. If corrupt opinions are simply translated directly into public policy it will matter little whether the regime is a democracy or an oligarchy; the result will be more or less the same, differing only on the nature of the specific corruption. Polling, by itself, cannot tell if the regime is totalitarian or not if regime policy merely corresponds to citizen opinion unless it also is capable of analyzing the nature of opinion. Fur- ther, the argument that the actual substance of mass opinion is not very important so long as the educated elites are committed to regime principles is not very persuasive in a regime built on the supposition of public virtue. Nor is it very reassuring if the elites themselves are somehow corrupted and the same polls that measure the distance between elite opinions and mass opinions are unable to distinguish which opinions, if any, reflect a moral corruption.

The Founders approached this problem by creating a constitutional space between public opinion and elected representatives. Its purpose was to provide a forum for the deliberation of policy issues. Participa- tory democracy was rejected because it virtually elimi- nated that space and placed the full burden of deliberation on the public as a whole. Some contemporary political scientists have attempted to confront the problem of mass deliberation by creating what is referred to as a "deliberative opinion poll"; an assembly of citizens randomly selected from a scientifically designed poll, who spend a few days talking and then register their opinions on designated subjects. The conceptual idea is that the results of a deliberative opinion poll


would somehow represent what public opinion would think about an issue if it seriously thought about the issue. The results, so far, are not very promising and the reason is not difficult to understand. Deliberation itself requires both time and space and, at best, the random selection of a citizen assembly with about 500 members, even when scientifically selected, does no more than mimic the elected Congress. The exercise is not necessarily a bad one, but merely pointless. But even in rather pointless failure, the effort of deliberation is a reminder of a central problem of participatory democracy in any form.

But deliberation was also a device that was designed to reduce the problem of demagoguery. The argument that elected representatives are no more than the instructed delegates of public opinion is, in effect, a de- nial that elected representatives have constitutional authority to decide issues independently of public opinion. One long-term consequence of this argument is to un- dermine the rule of constitutional law and authority as the basis for political decisions made by elected representatives. Public opinion polls can always be con- structed to show that almost any particular decision, certainly almost any controversial decision, made by elected officials does not perfectly match an opinion poll. One reason is that legislative decisions operating under the constraints imposed by the separation of powers will almost always be a bundle of compromises, not fully satisfactory to anyone but agreeable to a majority. Public opinion, however, operates under no such constraints. There is neither reason nor incentive to compromise. It would only be under unusual conditions when public opinion is homogeneous that this problem would be superfluous. What the Founders almost uni- formly feared was that the very requirement for homogeneous opinion would be an invitation to demagoguery. The multiplicity of factions would militate against this along with the sheer size of the nation as a whole. Opinion polling has weakened the constitutional authority of elected officials at the same time that it has elevated the highly charged ideological components of mass opinion. In so doing, it has weakened the constitutional safeguards against demagoguery. It places the full weight of guarding against that possibility on public opinion.

In practice, of course, the separation of powers remains in place and continues to function, albeit under conditions significantly different from those imagined by the Founders. When citizens met in person in the classical Greek polis, the power of the demagogue was derived from his manipulation of public passion. The psychology of the group as a whole was different from that of the individual citizen. This was Hamilton's point

in Federalist 15 when he said, "Has it been found that bodies of men act with more rectitude or greater disin- terestedness than individuals? The contrary of this has been inferred by all accurate observers of the conduct of mankind....A spirit of faction is apt to mingle its poison in the deliberation of all bodies of men, will often hurry the persons of whom they are composed into improprieties and excesses, for which they would blush in a private capacity." Of course Hamilton lived in an age in which men would still blush at the public revelation of private excesses and it would seem that the contemporary era cannot so easily rely on shame to discipline public officials. Constitutional institutions could work to dissipate public passions and hence the power that might be derived from them. But opinion polls, even the most benign and under the most favor- able circumstances, have the power seemingly to concentrate public opinion at a single point regardless of constitutional arrangements. The power that once be- longed to the classical demagogue in the manipulation of public opinion now resides in the pollster and whatever master he may choose to serve.

The Founders rejected participatory democracy not only on philosophical grounds, but also for practical reasons as well. The practical reason was linked to Madison's argument in Federalist 10 for an "extended republic." Federalism and the modes of popular election of officials would tend to make the formation of national majorities difficult, though not impossible. But it was also dictated by the sheer size of the proposed union of separate states. The Anti-Federalists were skeptical of the philosophical arguments, but they could not overcome the practical objections raised in The Feder- alist. It would be physically impossible for all of the citizens of the republic to assemble in person and to conduct the public business, as the citizens of the Greek polis had done. (And if all several hundred million did show up in the same place, who would want to join them?) Hence the arguments for the adoption of the Constitution won not simply because they were stron- ger arguments, but because there was no practical alternative to a representative form of government at the national level. What public opinion polls have done is to call into question the practical portion of the Founders' arguments. It may now be technically possible to have all citizens wired into a central computer that would permit their opinions at any rate to show up in the same place. Public opinion polls, in a unique way, concentrate the full power of public opinion in contra- vention of one of the central principles of the republican political philosophy of the Founders.

The democratic theory implicit in opinion polling represents an effort to reduce the theory and practice of


liberal democracy to a simple proposition; the transla- tion of majority public opinion into public policy. But this is a theory very much dependent on the relatively low intensity of policies the public may want. The instrumental reasoning Weber saw as characteristic of the modern state supposed that powerful forms of ideological reasoning would be the exception rather than the rule and, in any event, would be tied to charismatic leaders. Demagoguery would then reappear in the mod- em state, but in a new disguise. Even if all of the vari- ous technical problems could somehow be overcome, the argument would still have to confront the problem confronted by the original Founders: How much con- scious, or active, application of political knowledge is necessary to maintain a popular form of government that aims to be both just and democratic simultaneously? The corollary to this fundamental question is: To what degree are institutional arrangements such as the separation of powers, also necessary to maintain this form of government? The general thrust of democratic theorizing by pollsters tends to blur the distinction between knowledge and opinion in the first instance and mini- mize or ignore the importance of the second question. The most influential academic pollsters often continue to dismiss the Founders' concerns as "antiquated talk of passions and factions," forgetting that it may be a combination of institutions and general public morality that preserves the political system, much as the Founders intended. But their confidence may depend on the survival of the two aspects of the American political system most under attack by pollsters: the institutional arrangements of representative democracy and the virtue of the public. Would their confidence remain intact if either of these pillars of the American constitutional system were somehow in doubt? It places the full burden of maintaining a just form of popular government on public opinion alone even as it confesses an inability to distinguish moral opinion from immoral opinion, virtue from vice, or corruption from health. The numbers that emerge from opinion polling do less to illuminate the problems involved than to create a false sense of precision where imprecision is properly called for.

This last point may be the most important in regard the general nature of opinion polling. When we ask what is the perceived gain by the conceptualization of public opinion in the form of polls, the most obvious answer is "certainty." Certainty replaces uncertainty,

traditionally one of the most conspicuous characteristics of political life in any regime. But the certainty is most assuredly illusory. And, like all political illusions, it comes with a price tag attached. The quantification of public opinion as the fundamental reality of opinion is typically purchased at the price of moral reasoning, which tends not to be quantifiable by its very nature. It is the heart of the danger Weber feared in modernity but offered no solution. The measurement of public opinion divorced from moral reasoning is unlikely to produce a democratic theory capable of maintaining the sort of democracy Gallup and so many others have taken for granted as the norm of a just democracy - a democracy worthy of the affection of its citizens.

In a democracy that is nothing more than the latest public opinion poll, there are few things as settled as public opinion. In 1996, for example, Everett Carl Ladd, Director of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Re- search at the University of Connecticut, noted that the final presidential election results bore little resemblance to the pre-election polls, with the sole exception of the Reuters News Service Poll. One reason for this unreliability, he tentatively concluded, was that different polling organizations were using sufficiently different polling techniques so that the end results were skewed beyond normal probability. The irony of this would not be lost on any close reader of Gallup's Pulse of Democracy. Sixty years earlier Gallup had thought the technical problems of polling had been solved and the public could be reassured of the accuracy of polling by comparing polling forecasts with actual election results. As Aristotle long ago reminded his students of political science, precision is not to be sought for alike in every subject matter, but only so much as the subject matter itself permits. The danger is that the illusion of certainty begets the idea of predictability, and whoever controls predictability controls politics. Polling often creates the illusion that philosophical problems can be resolved by the proper application of scientific technique. This makes it all the more imperative that in a democracy such as ours it is the philosophical problems that are most in need of clarity because our culture is already predisposed to believe that science is the answer to whatever problems we face.

Sidney A. Pearson, Jr. is professor emeritus of political science at Radford University and series editor of Transaction's Library of Liberal Thought.


Documents

Public opinion andThe Pulse of Democracy