Public opinion formation

The social scientific study of public opinion formation is primarily concerned with exploring the general social and systemic conditions that enable and constrain the free exchange of viewpoints concerning matters of public interest. This type of research focuses on the concept of the public sphere as the arena in which the exchanges occur, and in spite of the harsh criticisms levelled at his early work and the many revisions his theory has undergone, Jürgen Habermas remains the seminal writer on the subject.

Habermas first developed his theory of the public sphere in his Habilitationsschrift, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, from 1962, which was belatedly translated into English in 1989. Bearing the subtitle An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society this work is primarily an investigation of the institutional frames and procedural norms that were constitutive of the public sphere in the period of early modernity. However, Habermas extends his analysis into the 20^th century, and his unveiled lament of the transformation he charts makes it difficult not to

conclude that Habermas ascribes general value to the bourgeois norms of opinion formation. Or, as Michael Warner explains in his account of Habermas’ theory, the ideals of bourgeois society hold an emancipatory potential to which modern culture should be held accountable (Warner, 2002, p.

46). One may deduce four such ideals or norms from the account given in Structural

Transformation. First, in public deliberation all discussants are treated as if they were social equals.

Second, the deliberation should only concern the common good, leaving out private interests and issues. Third, the public sphere should form a single, comprehensive whole. And fourth, a sharp division between civil society and the state should be maintained (Fraser, 1992, pp. 117-118).

In Structural Transformation Habermas concludes that the rise of the Welfare State and the appearance of the mass media have made it impossible to uphold the bourgeois norms. The argument concerning the mass media is that they transform public discussion into a commodity – mass media audiences are spectators not participants. As regards the welfare-model, it causes the borders between the public and the private to blur because the state now takes up many tasks that were previously left to the individual. The expansion of the domain of public intervention cannot be accompanied by an equal expansion of public discussion because the mass media impair the

citizens’ participation in public opinion formation. The combination of the heightened degree of state intervention into the individual’s life and the commodification of public opinion leads to a transformation of citizens into clients and consumers (Habermas, 1989, pp. 164, 170-171, and 232-233). This conclusion has been put into question by recent research, especially in the field of media studies. And, attentive to the results of this research, Habermas has recognised that the “…diagnosis of a unilinear development from a politically active public to one withdrawn into a bad privacy, from a ‘culture debating to a culture-consuming public,’ is too simplistic” (Habermas, 1992b, p.

438).

The critique of Habermas’ early understanding of the public sphere also moves beyond the diagnostic level in order to question the norms upon which the diagnosis depends.

Nancy Fraser (1992) is among the most thorough critics of the bourgeois norms of public opinion formation; she calls each of the four assumptions into question, showing that they are contingent upon the historical conditions in which they emerged and partial in their distribution of rights and opportunities.²⁷ Again, Habermas has been sensitive to his critics and now accepts that any

empirically existing public sphere is partial and exclusive in one way or another. Accordingly, the existence of various competing public spheres and the impossibility of creating a form of discussion that is equally accessible to everyone are recognised (Habermas, 1992b, p. 429 and 438). However, Habermas maintains that universal norms for communicative exchanges can be established, and on this basis he continues to hold a normative view of the public sphere from the perspective of which comparison of actually existing processes of opinion formation with universal, normative standards is possible.

Habermas presents the compiled results of the search for universal norms that has been a central theme throughout his academic career in the two-volume work The Theory of

27 Many other criticisms have been directed at the early Habermasian conception of the public sphere. See Calhoun (ed.) (1992) for a useful overview of various reconstructive readings of Structural Transformation and Robbins (ed.) (1993) for a partially overlapping but somewhat more radical critique of the concept of the public sphere.

Communicative Action (Habermas, 1984 and 1987). Here, the starting point is that all societal formations can be divided into two distinctive parts: a system governed by instrumental rationality and a lifeworld in which the rationality and corresponding mode of action is communicative.

Communicative action is defined as the form of rational action in which intersubjective

understanding is the goal. Habermas believes this goal to be integral to communication: “reaching understanding is the inherent telos of human speech” (Habermas, 1984, p. 287). Universal

communicative norms or validity criteria, claims Habermas, can be established on the basis of this telos and are embedded in the so-called ideal speech-situation. The ideal speech-situation consists of four norms to which all participants must adhere and for which they must account if so charged:

comprehensibility, truth, sincerity and social adequacy (Habermas, 1970). Habermas’ conclusive move is the establishment of a discourse ethics grounded in the claim that, if conducted properly, the interaction that is governed by communicative rationality will lead to agreement based upon

“the unforced force of the better argument.”

The end-result of his own and other scholars’ revisions of the original understanding of the concept, is that Habermas today views the public sphere as a dynamic communicative network:

The public sphere is a social phenomenon just as elementary as action, actor, association, or collectivity, but it eludes the conventional sociological concepts of

’social order.’ The public sphere cannot be conceived as an institution and certainly not as an organization. It is not even a framework of norms with differentiated competences and roles, membership regulations, and so on. Just as little does it represent a system;

although it permits one to draw internal boundaries, outwardly it is characterized by open, permeable, and shifting horizons. The public sphere can best be described as a network for communicating information and points of view (i.e., opinions expressing affirmative or negative attitudes); the streams of communication are, in the process, filtered and synthesized in such a way as to coalesce into bundles of topically specified public opinions. Like the lifeworld as a whole, so, too, the public sphere is reproduced through communicative action, for which mastery of a natural language suffices; it is tailored to the general comprehensibility of everyday communicative practice (Habermas, 1996, p. 360).

This definition takes the public sphere’s dependency on concrete communicative processes into account. It describes public opinion formation as a dynamic communicative act, and thereby it is directly linked to collective identity formation, as Habermas understands this process. “Collective identity […] can today only be grounded in the consciousness of universal and equal chances to participate in the kind of communication processes by which identity formation becomes a continuous learning process” (Habermas, 1974, p. 99).

Habermas’ theory of the public sphere has been greatly nuanced and improved since it was first launched, but one major weakness remains unamended. In spite of its understanding of the dynamic and continuous nature of the communicative processes that constitute present-day society Habermas’ theory contains no suggestions as to how the diverse and fragmented opinions of individuals come to merge into an expression of common understanding and collective will. The concrete communicative interactions without which any general conditions of public opinion formation are in reality null and void are not considered, and therefore it is not possible to account for the interaction between them.

The rhetorical understanding of public opinion formation takes the individual utterance as its starting point. The rhetorical scholar studies how the specific interrelations of text and context give rise to concrete meanings, and thus offers detailed insights into the interactions of which the communicative network of the public sphere consists. However, the process by which the many unique meanings expressed in individual utterances gather into common public opinion remains as elusive to the rhetorician as it does to the social scientist.²⁸ The recognition of this common explanatory failure has led rhetorical scholars to suggest that a proper conception of the process of public opinion formation can only be found in a combination of rhetorical and social scientific insights. It is thus proposed that the relationship between individual utterances and public opinion should be seen as being recursive and mutually constitutive (Hauser, 1999, p. 33).

The interdependence of the particular and the general may be explained as follows:

the speaker’s prior understanding of what constitutes a viable position on the given subject in the existing situation and of how this position can be expressed shapes each particular expression of opinion. In speaking his or her mind the speaker thus reproduces already existing expectations concerning the form and content of the particular expression of a viewpoint – each utterance is an instantiation of public opinion in both a subject specific and a broader communicative sense. But in creating its unique meaning the utterance may also contribute to the alteration of existing norms concerning what may be said and how one may say it. The speaker always has a choice: “[he or she]

can accept the sanctioned, widely used bundle of rules, claims, procedures and evidence to wage a dispute. Or, the arguer can inveigh any or all of these ‘customs’ in order to bring forth a new variety of understanding” (Goodnight, 1982, p. 217). In the persisting gap between collective views and

28 Meaning and opinion are obviously related terms; I understand meaning as synthesising the understanding and attitude expressed in concrete utterances, whereas (public) opinion implies a generality and collectivity that is detached from any specific utterance, but remains intricately related to the individuals’ formation of meaning and the concrete articulations thereof.

their individual expressions lies the possibility of opining differently (Farrell, 1993, p. 228).

The conclusion to these considerations of the recursive relationship between the specific and the general is that creation of public opinion is an ongoing dialogic process. Each utterance is conditioned by preceding utterances and in being uttered forms part of the context out of which subsequent utterances arise. Or, as the Russian literary critic Mikhail M. Bakhtin so aptly puts it, “any concrete utterance is a link in the chain of speech communication of a particular sphere” (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 91). General conditions for public opinion formation and commonly perceived public opinions arise in and through the interrelations of the particular utterances that constitute the ongoing societal conversation.

The perception of the recursiveness of specific articulations and general conditions leads to a reconciliation of the rhetorical and the social scientific approaches to public opinion formation. In accordance with the combined rhetorical-social scientific conception public opinion formation should indeed be studied in its only concrete manifestations, namely specific

communicative encounters, but the investigation should take account of the social norms, political institutions, and media structures that provide the broader context for each instance of

communicative interaction. And most significantly the analysis should aim at explaining the relationship between the utterances, thereby reaching a deeper understanding of the formal and substantial commonalities and differences that are operative in the communicative network under study. Explaining the relations between different utterances and between the texts and their contexts will be an important aim of the analysis of the debate on the future of Europe.