Public opinion.pdf (260.4 kB)
Public opinion and the "problem of information"
chapter
posted on 2015-05-20, 13:25 authored by Susan CondorThe term public opinion first gained popularity the 18th Century European enlightenment. Today, because of its centrality to the rationale of advanced liberal democracies, public opinion constitutes a nexus between the worlds of formal and everyday politics. This chapter outlines a tension between two competing assumptions about the relationship between public opinion and rational democratic governance. On the one hand, public opinion is treated as the ultimate source of political authority. On the other hand, the everyday opinion of mass publics is understood to be too heavily motivated by personal self-interest, and too deficient in factual understanding to ever serve as a legitimate basis for the governance of complex modern societies. In the second part of the chapter I present a case study from my own research on vernacular political reasoning, focusing on the phenomenon of empty attitudes: sincere opinions on matters of public debate which can be satisfactorily justified without recourse to detailed factual information.
History
School
- Social Sciences
Department
- Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies
Published in
Everyday PoliticsPages
xx - xx (xx)Citation
CONDOR, S., 2016. Public opinion and the "problem of information". IN: Howarth, S. and Andreouli, E. (eds). The Social Psychology of Everyday Politics. Routledge, Chapter 12.Publisher
© Taylor and FrancisVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2016Notes
This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in The Social Psychology of Everyday Politics on 27 March 2016, available online: http://www.routledge.com/9781138814455.ISBN
9781138814455Publisher version
Language
- en