THE IMPACT OF POLLING ON PUBLIC OPINION: RECONCILING FOUCAULT, HABERMAS, AND BOURDIEU

Internttional Journal of Public Opinion Research Vol. 4 No. 3 0954-2892/92 $3.00

THE IMPACT OF POLLING ON PUBLICOPINION: RECONCILING FOUCAULT,

HABERMAS, AND BOURDIEU

James R. Beniger

With the recent demise of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe,public opinion in most of the advanced industrial nations of the world will soonbe polled regularly, and the results routinely disseminated by mass mediaincreasingly global in reach. In the United States, the first country to begin toexperience this change, national polling of public opinion and the massdistribution of poll results has gone on continuously—with still growingfrequency and scope—for more than half a century (Beniger, 1986, ch. 8). Sowhat? What effects do public opinion polls have—if any—on modern econo-mies, polities and societies?

This is a central question addressed by the generation of Western Europeanintellectuals now in its early sixties, including French social scientist PierreBourdieu (1930- ), German sociologist and philosopher Jiirgen Habermas(1929— ), and the late French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault(1926-84). It is the central question for Thomas Goodnight, Susan Herbst, andLimor Peer, whose papers here on Habermas, Bourdieu, and Foucault, respect-ively, direct our attention to various things that may have changed becausepublic opinion polls now exist.

So far as I know, no sustained effort has yet been made to identify and classifyall of the various social and behavioral changes brought about by the develop-ment of public opinion polling. Let me therefore attempt to enumerate, withexamples from the three papers wherever possible, some of the ways that publicopinion polling may have made a difference. Although space does not permitlengthy evaluation of the various claims, many of which have yet to be tested inany systematic way, my hope is that classification, enumeration, and summaryalone will provide a useful first step toward a more careful investigation of thechanges described in the three papers.

At the most general level, such changes might be classified as one of five types:(1) changes in what is thought to constitute public opinion; (2) changes in whatmight alter or otherwise affect public opinion—when it is taken to be adependent variable—and in what ways; (3) changes in the effects that public

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opinion might have as an independent or causal variable; (4) changes in howindividual citizens think or behave because public opinion polls exist; and (5)similar changes that result because poll results are regularly disseminated by themass media.

Investigation of these five types of changes might be seen as an attempt atanalysis—comparative either for societies with or without polling or (preferably,considering the possible confounding variables) for single societies before andafter the advent of polling—to answer each of the following five questions:

(1) What constitutes public opinion?(2) What affects public opinion?(3) What does public opinion affect?(4) How does polling affect the individual?(5) How does dissemination of poll results affect the individual?

To attempt to answer even one of these questions through comparativeanalysis of societies would obviously require more time and effort than I candevote here. Because no one has yet attempted even to identify and organizesuch an effort, however, and because I consider the questions of growingimportance to the future of democracy in post-industrial mass society, I think itworthwhile to discuss each of them, if only briefly, and if only to highlight whatthe three papers here have to offer us by way of answers. Allow me, therefore, toconsider each of the five questions in turn.

(1) WHAT C O N S T I T U T E S PUBLIC OPINION?

All three of the papers published here suggest that the spread of public opinionpolling throughout the advanced industrial world has changed the essentialnature of public opinion itself. One such change involves the assumptions,implicit in all polls based on the scientific sampling of general populations, thateveryone might at least potentially have an opinion and that all opinions areequally important. As the Herbst paper indicates, Pierre Bourdieu has arguedthat

First, every opinion poll supposes that everyone can have an opinion; or, statedotherwise, that the production of an opinion is within everyone's range of possibility. Atthe risk of offending a naively democratic sentiment, I contest this. Second, it is taken forgranted that all opinions have the same value. I believe that it can be proven that this isfar from the truth, and that by gathering a plurality of opinions which do not have thesame real importance, the results are very severely distorted (Bourdieu, 1979, p. 124).

These changes in the essential nature of public opinion, according to

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Bourdieu, involve issues that are, as Goodnight—who cites Werner Jaeger(1944, pp. 182-96)—reminds us, 'at least as old as the Athenian democracy'. InGoodnight's words, the questions that embroiled ancient Athens were:

Should the polls adhere to beliefs informed by doxa, common opinion, or should itspolicies be shaped only by those who have refined, specialized knowledge secured byepisteme? Should civic communication be understood as a matter of timely andappropriate improvisation, or a rational discourse of the elites, or a systematic practiceamong educated citizens?

Survey research raises a much more extreme possibility for public opinionthan anything the ancient Athenians are likely to have imagined, the Peer papersuggests, with more frightening implications than anything considered byBourdieu. According to Peer, survey researchers not only assume that publicopinion is universally held, but that it might also be unconsciously held—and yetsubject to external measurement. 'Some argue that the opinion is there,'according to Peer, citing Schuman and Presser (1981), 'but the respondentdoesn't know what it is, and it is the interviewer's task to probe the respondent.'

Whether or not this fairly summarizes the detailed and careful analysis of'don't know' responses and 'nonattitudes' in Schuman and Presser's Questionsand Answers in Attitude Surveys (1981) readers may judge for themselves (seeespecially chapters 4-6). The mere possibility of unconscious opinions that mightbe externally identified and manipulated, however, possibly without the know-ledge of those who hold them, constitutes a new stage in the conceptualization ofpublic opinion—one with implications serious enough to merit further examina-tion.

Bourdieu's claims that polling reinforces two democratic conceptions ofpublic opinion—as potentially held by everyone and equally valued in eachperson—lead in the Herbst paper to a natural extension: that polling creates animpression of public opinion as uniformly informed. In Herbst's analysis of theClarence Thomas-Anita Hill controversy, for example, she states:

Anita Hill gave her testimony on a weekday, when many adults were at work, whileThomas gave his dramatic rebuttal on Friday evening. Furthermore, a panel of fourwitnesses who spoke for Anita Hill testified on the following Sunday morning, whentelevision viewership is low. Would the polls have looked different if pollsters had asked(and published) what respondents saw and what they missed?

This suggests that not only has public opinion become the aggregate ofindividual opinions, as measured by polls, but that even simple distinctions likethe relative knowledgeability of individual opinions is now of little interest—even when such knowledge is easily measured and likely to have an importantimpact. Certainly this conception of public opinion would have struck theancient Athenians as bizarre.

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Arguments that polling has fostered more egalitarian, democratic, or universalconceptions of public opinion must confront an older and precisely oppositeclaim: that polls represent not the aggregation of popular opinions but thereification of elite opinion. A decade before the first scientific polls, Americanjournalist Walter Lippmann (1922; 1925) argued that public opinion is, inHerbst's words, 'simply a projection of what political elites and journalists thinkabout', a point echoed a quarter-century later by sociologist Herbert Blumer(1948).

To the extent that it is poll questions and response sets—rather than thedistribution of answers—that determine the public policy agenda, polling beginsto abstract public opinion and to isolate it from actual political controversies.This result is only aggravated by the efforts of survey researchers to formulateobjectively neutral questions. Counter to this practice, Bourdieu proposes aradically different survey method in which

the imperatives of neutrality and scientific objectivity are overridden entirely. Ratherthan asking 'Some people are in favor of birth control, others against; how aboutyou?... ' , it would provide a series of explicit positions taken by groups elected toestablish and diffuse opinions, so that people could place themselves not in relation to aquestion to which they must invent both an answer as well as a problematic, but inrelation to problematics and responses which have already been prepared.... A contentanalysis of the general press, the trade union press, the political press, etc., would be thebasis of a sort of map which would contain all the known positions. Anyone whoproposes a position which is not on the map would be considered eclectic or incoherent(Bourdieu, 1979, pp. 127-8).

This passage points up—in its sharp contrast to more traditional surveypractices—the extent to which polling currently abstracts and isolates publicopinion from actual political discourse, a climate quite unlike that of ancientAthens. Bourdieu himself attempts to argue, in a strategy reminiscent of the so-called natural language philosophers, that his new method represents a concep-tion of public opinion more in keeping with everyday experience and language:

One commonly speaks of 'taking a position'; the expression must be understood in itsstrongest sense; the positions are there before us and we take them. But we do not takethem haphazardly. We take the positions which we are predisposed to take in function ofour position in a certain domain. . . . A rigorous analysis of ideologies should seek toexplain the relation between the structure of positions to be taken and the structure ofthe range of positions already objectively occupied (Bourdieu, 1979, p. 128).

Bourdieu's claim that polling reinforces a conception of public opinion quiteapart from actual political controversies leads Herbst to yet another naturalextension: that polling assumes a model of public opinion as wholly independentof the uses to which it might be put. As Herbst's analysis of the Thomas-Hillcontroversy leads her to ask,

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Did women without the benefit of higher education know that legislators saw theThomas polls as barometers of gender attitudes? If they had, would that have mattered?Along the lines of Bourdieu's critique, did working-class and uneducated women see thisissue as a political issue? Or was a decision, communicated to pollsters, about Thomas'sguilt or innocence seen as a simple judgment call having less to do with politics than withhuman nature? . . . Journalistic and legislative elites clearly recognized the Thomas-Hillcase as some sort of a litmus test about gender discrimination. But was this recognitionwidespread? And was it the proper interpretation of the event? The polls that werepublished during the two weeks surrounding the hearings cannot tell us the answer tothese questions.

Much as Bourdieu (1979, p. 128) sees the model of public opinion assumed inpolling as one in which individual opinions are separated from 'the structure ofpositions to be taken and the structure of the range of positions alreadyobjectively occupied', Herbst sees this model as one in which opinions existindependently of the political uses to which they might be put.

How, then, in summary, has the rise of public opinion polling changed theessential nature of public opinion? In contrast to the classical conception ofpublic opinion of ancient Athens, the three papers published here argue that,because of scientific polling, public opinion has increasingly become (1)something in which not just the elite but everyone might at least potentiallyparticipate; (2) an aggregate of individual opinions in which all are assumed to beof equal importance and uniformly informed; (3) something which might beunconscious in individuals and yet subject to external measurement andmanipulation; (4) something abstracted and isolated from actual politicalcontroversies and discourse; and (5) something wholly independent of the usesto which it might be put.

(2) WHAT AFFECTS PUBLIC OPINION?

In addition to changes in what is thought to constitute public opinion, the rise ofscientific polling has also been accompanied by changes in public opinion—asvariously defined—considered as a dependent variable. Although all three of thepapers published here address various of these changes, Thomas Goodnight'sdiscussion of Jiirgen Habermas places the question in broadest context.

Although Goodnight gives scant attention to public opinion polling by name,following Habermas, he clearly intends to implicate polling in what Habermas(1962) calls 'the structural transformation of the public sphere'. Not until theseventeenth-century Scientific Revolution and the rise of civil society andEnlightenment discourse in eighteenth-century Europe, according to Habermas,did the public sphere—and with it public opinion—exist in the modern sense ofprivate citizens freely debating serious issues of common, largely commercialinterest. In Goodnight's words, 'The requirements for generating public

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THE IMPACT OF POLLING ON PUBLIC OPINION 2<X)

opinion, according to Habermas, were serious discussions attached to matters ofcommon interests where decisions were ruled by open, informed argumen-tation'. As Goodnight quotes Habermas (1962, p. 52),

With the rise of a sphere of the social, over whose regulation public opinion battled withpublic power, the theme of the modern (in contrast to the ancient) public sphere shiftedfrom the properly political tasks of citizenry acting in common (i.e., administration oflaw as regards internal affairs and military survival as regards external affairs) to the morecivic tasks of a society engaged in critical public debate (i.e., the protection of thecommercial economy). The political task of the bourgeois public sphere was theregulation of civil society (in contradistinction to res publica, i.e., the State).

Although Habermas has not been clear about precisely when this modernpublic sphere 'collapsed', to use his term, his various accounts of the demise welldescribe economic and social conditions in the early- to mid-nineteenth century,a stage of rationalization that at least in the United States might be associatedwith the rise of scientific polling (Beniger, 1986, ch. 8). Compelling evidence canbe found in the central roles given by Habermas to 'public relations', by whichhe means the stage in which 'publicity' (defined by Goodnight as 'a kind ofshowing of activity of notice' which 'creates an opening for rational appraisal ofthose whose interests are effected by the decisions of authority') becomesdetached from critical-rational discussion, thereby reducing public discourse tolittle more than 'show and display' (Habermas 1962, pp. 200-1). Accompanyingthis change is the rise of the large nation state and its encroachment into theprivate sphere accompanied by the growing complicity of the press—formerlyan essential conduit of critical-rational information.

Thus Habermas (1962) might well have had public opinion polling in mindwhen he explained—as Goodnight quotes him—the 'collapse' of 'the communi-cative network of a public made up of rationally debating private citizens'.Public opinion based on such a network, according to Habermas, has nowbifurcated in a way often attributed to scientific polling, for example, by variousmass society theorists (Beniger 1987). Public opinion, that is to say, hasbifurcated into individual or privately held opinions, on the one hand, and intoformally measured opinions well publicized by powerful institutions to anunorganized mass audience on the other. As Goodnight quotes Habermas (1962,pp. 247-8),

The public opinion once emergent from [the public sphere] has partly decomposed intothe informal opinions of private citizens without a public and partly become concen-trated into formal opinions of publisdcally effective institutions. Caught in the vortex ofpublicity that is staged for shorn or manipulation, the public of nonorganized private peopleis laid claim to not by public communication but by the communication of publiclymanifested opinions.

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Certainly few if any technologies have better advanced 'the communication ofpublicly manifested opinions' than that of scientific polling.

Who stages 'for show or manipulation' these 'publicly manifested opinions'?Modern politicians and their technical strategists do, at least according toHabermas, who identifies Niccolo Machiavelli as the first modern politicaltheorist. As Goodnight describes the reasons,

Machiavelli undermines classical politics by changing opinion as a representation ofbelief, conviction, or conduct into an appearance strategically sculpted to make aseamless convincing impression. Thereby, the place in which powerful discourse iscrafted is changed. Open processes become merely sites where private plans are put intoeffect. The common art of opinion making is disconnected from the precepts of sagaciousadvisory discourse where real power is transmitted. Thus, cultural inculcation of acommon political and ethical discourse gives way to expertise and strategy. In short,'only the "mechanical" workmanlike skill of the strategist remains for politics' (Haber-mas, 1973, p. 59). The public realm is no longer a place for debating a matter, but a sceneof struggle where lions of the state contest for power.

Thus does Habermas account for the historical transformation of publicopinion from what Goodnight calls 'sagacious advisory discourse where realpower is transmitted' into 'an appearance strategically sculpted to make aseamless convincing impression'. It is but one of many ways, as noted in all threeof the papers published here, in which the rise of scientific polling (one thingHabermas might have meant by 'the "mechanical" workmanlike skill of thestrategist' in politics) has causally affected public opinion taken as a dependentvariable.

Limor Peer makes two more specific claims about the effect of scientificpolling on public opinion considered as a dependent variable. First, she notesthat quantification, measurement, and 'normalization' serves to objectify publicopinion, a necessary condition—she argues—if it is to be 'considered and actedupon'. Second, she observes that survey research has led respondents to 'provideopinions on, or substantive responses to, fictitious issues (i.e., issues that do notexist and therefore having a real opinion about them is impossible)'. This meansthat fictitious public opinion might, in effect, be fabricated by highly rationalizedand seemingly scientific means. As Peer—following Philip Converse—extendsthe argument,

A less obvious case of 'non-opinions' is when substantive opinions are provided, butstatistical analyses that reveal low inter-item correlations and low over-time consistency. . . [Converse (1964)] suggested that only a small proportion of the population havecoherent ideological belief systems that bind ideas together.

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Peer notes that Schuman and Presser (1981) attempt to refute Converse'sinterpretation of these findings but concludes it is 'an issue open for debate'.

Susan Herbst, in extending the work of Bourdieu and Ginsberg, contributesseveral additional claims about the effect of scientific polling on public opinionconsidered as a dependent variable. According to Herbst, public opinion pollingestablishes an 'artificial political environment which does not mimic the realdimensions of the public sphere'; creates 'a tangible thing called "publicopinion"' independent of 'how significant those issues were to respondents';gives public opinion an artificial structure and stability that are continuallyexposed by 'an important event or "intervening crisis'"; 'domesticates' publicopinion by structuring it, thereby diminishing its intensity; narrows the range ofpublic opinion that ordinarily comes to public attention; obscures the 'realpolitical controversy' that envelops public opinion in its natural settings; affordspoliticians rational grounds to 'delegitimate' the public opinion of 'groups whochallenge the status quo'; helps to publicize and thereby to 'reinforce' the publicopinion of 'political elites'; and gives greater authority to public opinion as afactor in public policy debates.

How, then, in summary, has the rise of scientific polling affected publicopinion—as variously defined—considered as a dependent variable? For Haber-mas, polling has been part of the general historical trend of increasingrationalization, which he finds implicated in nothing less than the 'collapse of themodern public sphere'. All three of the papers published here present numerousmore specific claims for changes in what might alter or otherwise affect publicopinion. Most of these claims can be reconciled with the argument of Habermasin at least its most general form.

(3) WHAT DOES PUBLIC OPINION AFFECT?

Public opinion interests us not only as a dependent variable but as anindependent variable as well. To what extent has the rise of scientific polling ledto changes in the effects of public opinion on modern economies, polities, andsocieties? Although all three of the papers published here address various ofthese changes, Limor Peer's paper—grounded in the work of Michel Foucault—places the question in broadest context.

Particularly useful is Foucault's analysis of power. Although Foucault neverdeveloped a formal theory of power, he consistently saw power as process—asstrategies and practices 'exercised rather than possessed' (Foucault, 1977, p. 26).Pursuit of this view led him away from analysis of the State, the traditionaldomain of political theory, to the study of power as emergent in the practices oflesser institutions like prisons, hospitals, and schools. At this level, Foucaultfinds power dependent not so much on the legitimized use of force (as it is for the

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State) but on control through reciprocal flows of information, that is, dependenton communication with feedback. Foucault calls these reciprocal flows 'produc-tion of knowledge' and 'surveillance', respectively. /

Like any good cyberneticist, Foucault finds that intelligence, communication,and power 'reinforce one another in a circular process' (Foucault, 1977, p. 224).Although public opinion pollsters, for example, might seek data on individualsonly to produce more rationalized public knowledge, such relationships ofknowledge production and surveillance necessarily constitute power relations(and vice versa), Peer argues, so that pollsters must contribute—howeverunwittingly—to societal control. The result has been, according to Foucault, arise in what he calls 'disciplinary power' relative to state power: control not ofproperty but of behavior (as symbolized, for example, by Jeremy Bentham'sPanopticon).

Foucault finds 'disciplinary power' in a conflux of forces—the historicaldevelopment of rationalization, scientific methodology, systematic data gather-ing, quantification and calculation, and the mass dissemination of knowledge—that are all well represented in the rise of public opinion polling after the early1930s (Beniger, 1986, ch. 8). Observation, measurement, and communicationare, in turn, both necessary and sufficient for control, according to Foucault.Although the exercise of such control might often fail, of course, Foucault'sapproach has proven valuable for—if nothing else—suggesting where studentsof power in society might best direct their attention.

Limor Peer follows Foucault's suggestive lead in directing her attention to'the practice of opinion polling as a disciplinary mechanism'. This results inseveral claims about public opinion—as measured and publicized via scientificpolling—as an independent variable: that public opinion both 'validates thedemocratic discourse' and serves as its 'correcting mechanism'; that it imposes'compulsory visibility' while remaining itself 'invisible', an 'exercise of power'that makes the public 'an object of knowledge and observation'; and that it'produces' individuals as 'entities within categories', thereby creating a publicthat 'cannot escape categorization, and therefore, cannot escape power'.

What does all this mean? Peer understands from Foucault that categorizationdistinguishes 'that which is discursive (i.e., "normal", "social" and "true") andthat which is resistant (i.e., "abnormal", "asocial" and "false")'. From this sheconcludes: 'The tension between the discourse and the resistance to the discourseis inherent in disciplinary power. But this tension is not likely to be resolved, sinceit is the discourse itself that produced the discursive matter as well as the resistantmatter'. By equating 'democratic principle' with 'discourse' and the scientifictreatment of 'no opinion' responses with 'disciplinary power', Peer concludes:

The democratic discourse states that we all have opinions, and therefore those who donot have opinions are seen as the 'other' of the discourse. In relation to this discourse, the

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practice of polling works to validate the discourse, and to serve as its correctingmechanism: polls extract opinions from those who have them, confirming the discoursethat these opinions matter, and at the same time, the practice perfects its methodology inan attempt to reduce or eliminate those responses that seem to indicate that the personhas no opinion. Thus, opinion polls, as a disciplinary mechanism, work on two levels,corresponding to the two parts of the discourse.

Finding the essential features of this 'disciplinary mechanism' in 'theprinciple of panopticism' (Foucault, 1977), by which the controlled are compul-sorily visible while the controllers remain invisible (Foucault, 1977, p. 199), Peeridentifies the same features in public opinion polling:

Polling the public's opinions makes the public continuously visible; it becomes an objectof knowledge and observation. It does not matter who commissioned the poll, or who thepollster is, the fact is that they all have the power to observe the public at any given time.The public, therefore, cannot escape categorization, and therefore, cannot escape power.

Why does categorization imply control? Embracing Foucault's fundamentalpremise that knowledge is power, and vice versa, Peer cites his work severaltimes to establish that

the definitions of the discourse generate a body of knowledge about individuals. This isthe type of power that 'objectifies those on whom it is applied' (Foucault, 1977, p. 220),and enables the accumulation of knowledge about them. This knowledge can later beused to control their lives.. .. The actual participation of people in an opinion pollenables the continuation of the categorization of people. . . . Polls generate an enormousamount of data which is used to 'characterize, classify, specialize; distribute along a scale,around a norm, hierachize individuals in relation to one another and, if necessary,disqualify and invalidate' (Foucault, 1977, p. 223).

Because of this power of public opinion polling (and many other twentieth-century technologies), based on increasingly rationalized means to gather andprocess information, to facilitate mass communication, and thereby to controlbehavior in large populations (as do advertising, market research, and publicrelations), Peer claims that such technologies have contributed to a revolutionarychange in the nature of political power—from 'classic sovereignty' to aproliferation of 'disciplinary mechanisms'—in the advanced industrial state:

Classic sovereign power is that which is seen, yet the subjects remain invisible unlessdirectly influenced by that power. But disciplinary power is invisible, manifested only inits gaze, turning the 'subjects' into 'objects' of observation who cannot see the power butonly feel its effects. The advantage of compulsory visibility is that it assures, and atteststo, the exercise of power over its objects. Furthermore, this exercise of power turns outto be at minimal cost since the gaze is continuous, and is felt by the objects until theyinternalize it and become their own overseers (Foucault, 1980, p. 155).

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Thomas Goodnight, in elaborating the ideas of Habermas, suggests severaladditional ways in which scientific polling has produced changes in the effects ofpublic opinion on modern industrial societies. Collapse of the 'bourgeois publicsphere' associated with increasing rationalization of public opinion measurementand analysis, according to Goodnight, has meant that 'the principles which linkcritical rationality to the practice of politics through freedom of speech,assembly, access to information and accountability can no longer be assumed tobe governing or perhaps even relevant'. Nor can we be assured that societies willany longer—in the words of Roderick (1986, p. 42)—'recognize those truths andvalues as their own'. On a more optimistic note, however, Goodnight interpretsHabermas's Theory of Communicative Action (1987) to imply that the samechanges have left the mass media in 'an ambivalent role' in which they 'actsimultaneously as vehicles of social control and (unintentionally) as conduits formessages that spark opposition'.

(4) HOW DOES POLLING AFFECT THE INDIVIDUAL?

In addition to changes in what is thought to constitute public opinion, and inpublic opinion's role as both an effect and a cause of other societal changes, therise of scientific polling—the growing rationalization of public opinion measure-ment and assessment—has also affected individual thought and behaviorgenerally in ways quite distinct from any possible effects of mass mediadissemination of particular poll results. Related to Habermas's claims for the'collapse of the modern public sphere', for example, are various of the argumentsabout the effects of public opinion polling on individuals that Limor Peergrounds in the work of Foucault.

Although Peer's contention that 'the practice of modern opinion polling is adisciplinary mechanism which creates a "public that has opinions'" wouldappear to contradict the claims made by Habermas, her immediate conclusionthat 'the consequences of this process include the exercise of power, surveillanceand control' seems at least reconcilable with Habermas's general argument. AsPeer elaborates her conclusion about 'modern opinion polling' as a 'disciplinarymechanism':

The most important consequence of this process of discipline is surveillance. Thissurveillance is not on the individual level, but on a societal level (since people are equallyimportant and thus replaceable, there is no significance in one particular opinion orperson). The surveillance of the population is manifested in the obsession to 'predicttrends in public opinion', to 'be tuned in to public opinion' and to constantly 'check thepulse of public opinion'.

Although such surveillance is 'not on the individual level, but on a societal

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level', as Peer claims, it nevertheless results in the aggregate statistical control ofindividual behavior. Granted this may be the weakest and most probabilisticform of control, which might be denned as the purposive influence on behaviorhowever slight, but it is control nonetheless. It is control in the same sense that,for example, economists speak of television advertising to control specificdemand, or that political scientists say that direct mail campaigns help to controlissue-voting, even though only a small fraction of the intended audience may beinfluenced in either case (Beniger, 1986, p. 8).

In sharp contrast to Habermas's relatively passive picture of polls as part of'publicity' that reduces public discourse to little more than 'show and display',Peer advances a more active model in which polls contribute to 'a public that hasopinions' for its 'surveillance and control'. She explicitly cites Bourdieu, HerbertBlumer and Benjamin Ginsberg as among the 'critical theorists' against whomshe wishes to contrast her own view of polling and public opinion:

Most of them contend that the process of polling is one which involves the manufactur-ing and manipulation of opinions, and results in the reification of public opinion or thedefinition of the public agenda (see Bourdieu, 1979). They are interested in the realitywhich is constructed through the questions, and in the ability of the polls to producepublic opinion that is agreeable to the ruling elites or to the commissioner of the poll.This inquiry leads to the conclusion that polls are a poor, if not dangerous, measure ofopinions (Blumer, 1948; Ginsberg, 1986). While an important avenue for academicpursuit, I do not wish to repeat these claims. Rather, my intention is to conduct a criticalgenealogy of polls and show that they, like other social institutions, have a part increating us as modern individuals.

Thus while Habermas sees increasing rationalization of the commercialeconomy, including the rise of scientific polling, as contributing to the 'collapseof the modern public sphere' (an effect on public opinion), Peer views polling as'creating us as modern individuals', which involves the distinctly modernphenomenon of 'a public that has opinions' (an effect on individual thought andbehavior). As she interprets Jean Baudrillard, 'If people should have opinions,they will provide all of them, all the time'. In this way, Peer isolates aparticularly important result of polling methodology as it becomes morepopularly known: It creates individuals with individual opinions, including—toanticipate my next section—individuals who increasingly use poll results to formthose opinions.

Polling is often claimed to affect individual opinion, even apart from thedissemination of particular poll results, through the capacity of survey questionsand response categories to influence the public policy agenda. Even Bourdieu,unaware of seemingly contradicting his earlier descriptions of polls as demo-cratizing public opinion, argues:

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What I have called the effect of imposition of the problematic, an effect utilized by allopinion polls and political investigations (beginning with elections), results from the factthat the questions asked in an opinion survey are not the questions which are a realconcern for the people questioned, and the responses are not interpreted in function ofthe problematic used by different categories of respondents in their actual reply. Thusthe dominant problematic, whose image is provided by the list of questions posed duringthe last two years by the polling institutes, is the problematic which essentially intereststhe people who hold power and who consider themselves to be well informed about themeans of organizing their political action (Bourdieu, 1979, p. 127).

Susan Herbst, in extending the work of Bourdieu, suggests several additionalways in which scientific polling affects individual thought and behavior. Theseeming 'neutrality and objectivity' of polling methodology, she maintains,'denies the existence of real political controversy', thereby suggesting toindividuals that opinions are to be formed in isolation from political debate. Theincreasingly familiar activity of public opinion polling, according to Herbst,draws individuals into a growing audience for poll results, so that whenconfronted by dramatic news events, 'we wonder: "What do the polls say?".' Shealso finds that polling has led many people (though not the elite) to minimize theskills of traditional party bosses, who 'because they had a deep, texturedunderstanding of their constituents' interests could think in hypotheticals—howlocal members of their party would feel if particular events occurred or failed tooccur'.

(5) HOW DOES DISSEMINATION OF POLL RESULTSAFFECT THE INDIVIDUAL?

Not only does scientific polling itself affect how individuals think and behave—so, too, does the growing dissemination of poll results by the mass media. Thisdistinction—between the separate effects of polling activity and of the masscommunication of poll results—is important to applying the individual insightsof Foucault, Habermas and Bourdieu, all three of whom rank among the mostimportant theorists of communication (Beniger, 1990).

Certainly the mass communication of poll results has become an increasinglyprominent feature of advanced industrial society, not only for routine publicissues (like approval of a nation's leader or confidence in its economy), but alsofor more dramatic events. As Herbst reports on the Thomas-Hill controversy,for example, 'public opinion polls were widely quoted before and after thehearings'. Because most polls exist only to be reported in the news media, Herbstreminds us, this raison d'etre becomes, in turn, the reason why polls—contrary tothe ideals set forth by Bourdieu—are necessarily superficial:

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Since the Thomas-Hill controversy was a fast-moving one, polls had to be conductedquickly. If one tried to create a survey which took into account Bourdieu's concerns, thepoll would lose its news value because it would take so long to design and administer. Inaddition, only limited space can be devoted to a story reporting the results of opinionpolls. . . . A survey which scrutinized respondents' understanding of the event, and theirtrue political interests, would have been a lengthy one.

Bourdieu (1979, p. 124) argues about scientific public opinion polling that 'thesimple fact of asking everyone the same question implies the hypothesis thatthere is a consensus about the problem, that is, an agreement about whichquestions are worth asking'. When the questions and response categories aredisseminated by the mass media, and asked again at regular intervals by surveyresearchers emulating the fixed stimuli of hard science, the effect is that ofagenda setting, a phenomenon increasingly studied since the early 1970s(McCombs and Shaw, 1972; Iyengar and Kinder, 1987). As Herbst notes, 'pollscan rarely set agendas by themselves, since they are most often conducted orcommissioned when an issue gains attention', a constraint polls share with mediareporting in general.

Peer extends the agenda-setting effect of mass media coverage of poll resultsto deeper cognitive effects on how people remember, envision, and think aboutpublic opinion and the public that has opinions. Noting the contention of Foucault(1977, p. 223) that disciplines 'characterize, classify, specialize; distribute along ascale, around a norm, hierarchize individuals in relation to one another and, ifnecessary, disqualify and invalidate', Peer argues: 'In the same vein, thepublication of opinion poll results in the media reinforces this categorization'.

Peer's point appears compatible with the mechanism Lippmann (1922, p. 18)described as 'pictures inside the heads of human beings', about whom he arguedthat 'the pictures of themselves, of others, of their needs, purposes, andrelationships, are their public opinions'. Similarly, the constraints that Peer seesas imposed upon public opinion by the rationalized and statistical nature ofsurvey methodology seem compatible with what Lippmann (1922, p. 18)considered 'the chief factors which limit people's access to the facts', especially'the distortion arising because events have to be compressed into very shortmessages, the difficulty of making a small vocabulary express a complicatedworld'.

To the degree that mass media reporting of poll results serves to set the publicagenda, the extension of Bourdieu's claims by Herbst—that polling creates animpression of public opinion as uniformly informed—takes on increasedimportance. The implication is clearly that the mass media promote reification ofthe various assumptions of survey methodology, including the assumptions thatall opinions measured and reported are equally informed and equally regardedby those who hold them. These assumptions, necessary for at least the simple

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2 l 8 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PUBLIC OPINION RESEARCH

statistical analyses to which news reporting is usually limited, are often far fromrealistic. As Herbst asks of the Thomas-Hill hearings: 'Of the people whobelieved Thomas of Hill, how much of the testimony did they view? How muchattention did they pay to the hearings? These questions are absolutely critical,but we cannot answer them using the much-discussed New York Times poll'.

Herbst gives at least two other important but as yet relatively unexploredeffects of mass media reporting of poll results: first, such publicity means thatpollsters increasingly 'travel in the same circles as journalists and policy makers'.This, in turn, may help to foster a false impression of public opinion'simportance in policy formulation. As Herbst argues,

All opinions may be equal in the eyes of the pollster, but in terms of politics and policymaking, this is not necessarily the case. Candidates and office-holders do watch the polls.. . but they also listen to a variety of interest group leaders and donors. We should ask,as Bourdieu (and Blumer) does, how much opinion polls matter in the policy process.And we should never assume that polls somehow mean more (or tell us more) than doesthe study of power differentials and social structure.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

After more than half a century, scientific polling continues to grow ever morerationalized in its methods for measuring and assessing public opinion evenwhile it continues to diffuse throughout the industrialized nations of the world.What has been the impact of such polling on conceptions of public opinion, andon public opinion's role in modern economies, polities and societies?

As we have seen, such questions have been central to the work of MichelFoucault, Jiirgen Habermas and Pierre Bourdieu, as well as to various otherEuropean and American scholars. The papers by Thomas Goodnight, SusanHerbst and Limor Peer draw on these three theorists and others to identifyvarious ways that the world has changed because of public opinion polling. Tothe extent that such changes remain largely unidentified or understudied, andyet are crucial to any reasonable conception of a democratic or free society, thethree papers constitute a valuable contribution to what I hope will become agrowing body of work on the subject.

REFERENCES

Beniger, James R. (1986): The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins ofthe Information Society, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.

Beniger, James R. (1987): 'Toward an Old New Paradigm: The Half-Century Flirtationwith Mass Society', Public Opinion Quarterly, 51, No. 4, Pt. 2, pp. S46-S66.

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Beniger, James R. (1990): 'Who Are the Most Important Theorists of Communication?'Communication Research, 17, No. 5, pp. 698—715.

Blumer, Herbert (1948): 'Public Opinion and Public Opinion Polling', AmericanSociological Review, 13, No. 5, pp. 542-52.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1979): 'Public Opinion Does Not Exist'. In: Armand Mattelart andSeth Siegelaub (eds.), Communication and Class Struggle, Vol. 1, Capitalism, Imperia-lism. New York, International General, pp. 124-30.

Converse, Philip E. (1964): 'The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics'. In David E.Apter (ed.), Ideology and Discontent, New York, Free Press (pp. 206-61).

Foucault, Michel (1977): Discipline and Punish: Birth of the Prison, A. Sheridan (trans.),New York, Pantheon.

Foucault, Michel (1980): Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings,iQ"]2-igjj, C. Gordon (ed.), New York, Pantheon.

Ginsberg, Benjamin (1986): The Captive Public: How Mass Opinion Promotes StatePower, New York, Basic.

Habermas, Jiirgen (1962): The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: AnInquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence(trans.), Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.

Habermas, Jiirgen (1973): Theory and Practice, John Viertel (trans.), Boston, Beacon.Habermas, Jiirgen (1987): The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2, Lifeworld and

System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, Thomas McCarthy (trans.), Boston,Beacon.

Iyengar, Shanto, and Kinder, Donald R. (1987): News That Matters: Television andAmerican Opinion, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Jaeger, Werner (1944): Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture: The Conflict of CulturalIdeas in the Age of Plato, Gilbert Highet (trans.), New York, Oxford University Press.

Lippmann, Walter (1922): Public Opinion, New York, Harcourt, Brace.Lippmann, Walter (1925): The Phantom Public, New York, Harcourt, Brace.McCombs, Maxwell E., and Shaw, Donald L. (1972). The Agenda-Setting Function of

Mass Media. Public Opinion Quarterly, 36, No. 2, pp. 176-87.Roderick, Rick (1986): Habermas and the Foundations of Critical Theory, New York, St.

Martin's.Schuman, Howard, and Presser, Stanley (1981): Questions and Answers in Attitude

Surveys: Experiments on Question Form, Wording, and Context, Orlando, FL, Aca-demic.

BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE

James R. Beniger is a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication atthe University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He is the associate editorof Communication Research and author of The Control Revolution: Technologicaland Economic Origins of the Information Society (Harvard University Press,1986).

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Documents

THE IMPACT OF POLLING ON PUBLIC OPINION: RECONCILING FOUCAULT, HABERMAS, AND BOURDIEU