"A history teacher, at the end of his term, gave a final speech to his students, 'Remember, jokes and history are the same—both always repeat themselves.""Government makes policy that reflects public preferences and there is a quite strong connection between public opinion and government policy," Senduro proceeded while examining the twin Dvarapala statues, the guardians of Manjushri Grha entrance, known as Sewu temple—although the complex consists of 249 temples, this Javanese name translates to 'a thousand temples,' which originated from local folklore Rara Jonggrang—was built by the end of the eighth century, at the end of Rakai Panangkaran's reign and was completed during the reign of his successor, Dharanindra, the Sailendra dynasty who was the Emperor of Mataram in Central Java and Srivijaya in South Sumatera."Political leaders need to know what sorts of policies and initiatives voters support, but other groups and individuals also need a working knowledge of public opinion. Interest group leaders must decide which battles to wage and how best to mobilize potential supporters. Journalists, who are key players in measuring and communicating public opinion, strive both to inform those of us who are curious about our fellow citizens’ attitudes and to understand what their audience wants. Corporate executives must pay attention to trends in the country's culture—what consumers think about, what they purchase, and generally, how they choose to live.The tendency to represent public preferences has increased as politics has become a career path during the twentieth century, and that politicians have become (out of desire for reelection) more reliably interested in keeping voters happy Politicians have both a keen interest in representing the public and the seeming means to do so.Representation is also at the heart of everyday political debate, say Stuart N. Soroka and Christopher Wlezien. Citizens care about what they get from government, whether it’s tax cuts or prescription drug benefits or education subsidies. They also care about the degree to which what government does matches their preferences for various other things, whether it’s the amount of healthcare, the availability of abortion, environmental protection, or going to war.Not all politics is explicitly about policy, of course. Citizens also care about outcomes, and many argue that this is true now more than ever before. People want a growing economy, safe streets, and high-quality healthcare. Policy nevertheless is implicated, of course. Politicians do not have magic wands–they influence outcomes using policy. Politicians offer plans to solve important problems, such as a struggling economy. There are policies to reduce crime, improve education , fix healthcare , and so on, and when conditions improve, politicians don’t claim to have been lucky. They explicitly credit policy, for instance, when they declare that 'Our tax cut policy got the economy moving again,' or that 'We put more police on the streets and crime came down.' Policy clearly matters for both outcomes and politics. We want things, and, through policy, politicians try to deliver.Public opinion is endlessly discussed in politics and culture. The president, members of Congress, candidates for public office, interest group leaders, journalists, and corporate executives, as well as ordinary citizens, routinely ask, 'What does the public think?'How can all of us obtain information about public opinion? There are many sources. Perhaps the most obvious indicator of public opinion is the sample survey or opinion poll. Quantitative data from surveys can often give us a sense of how citizens feel about policy issues, social practices, or lifestyle issues. The results of elections and referenda sometimes reveal citizens’ preferences in very dramatic ways; it is often said that an election is the only poll that matters. Yet political enthusiast must go beyond these obvious techniques and consider all of the “places” that people’s opinions can be found: in the scripts of television programs; at political rallies, town meetings, or city council hearings; in the rhetoric of journalism; in the dialogue among friends who frequent a coffeehouse or neighborhood bar; in the political discussions one sees on the Internet and on social media or hears on talk radio.Sherry Devereaux Ferguson mentions that as the first major philosopher to use the term l'opinion publique, Jean-Jacques Rousseau speaks of the importance of public opinion, its impact on rulers, and the necessity of being able to influence and control opinion. According to Mitch Horowitz, public opinion is the aggregate result of individual opinions—now uniform, now conflicting—of the men and women who make up society or any group of society. In modern debate, some claim that Lippmann's work, a bridge into the modern age, shifts the emphasis from philosophical treatises on public opinion to scientific studies of opinion. This statement is only partly true. The importance of public opinion is as old as democracy itself: the ancient Greek philosophers believed that democratic institutions, to be effective, had to be grounded in a solid analysis of popular sentiments. Authors such as Plato, Hobbes, Hamilton, and Madison express serious reservations about the potential of the average citizen to make a meaningful contribution to the workings of government.Another group of philosophers adhere to the view that even though the mass public has little to contribute to government, their elected leaders can not afford to ignore their views. In other words, they view citizen engagement as a necessary evil. For example, in The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli writes that public opinion can either support individual ambition or, alternatively, the collective good. In The Prince, Machiavelli states that public opinion is fickle, driven by the fact that humans are 'ungrateful, voluble, dissemblers, anxious to avoid danger, and covetous of gain; as long as you benefit them, they are yours'. To remain in power, rulers must either manipulate or accommodate public opinion.A third cluster of philosophers espouse the view that public opinion has a critical role to play in democratic societies. Aristotle recognizes the potential superiority of a collective intelligence, 'They may surpass—collectively and as a body, although not individually—the quality of the few best'. He is optimistic that public debate and discussion can be the vehicles for informed, intelligent decision making. John Locke argues that those in power have a duty to protect the rights of the governed. He says that the community ultimately is the 'supreme power,' and that the law of public opinion is equal in importance to civil and divine law.In conclusion, the first school of philosophers (pessimists) views citizen engagement as undesirable and unnecessary. The second school of thought (pragmatists) views citizen involvement as undesirable but necessary. The third group of philosophers (optimists) views citizen engagement as both desirable and necessary. The fundamentals of the debate have not shifted, and many civic leaders believe that they face a no-win situation. They are damned if they 'do' and damned if they 'don't.' If leaders follow public opinion, critics say that they have no leadership qualities—that they follow public whims, which change on a daily basis. If leaders ignore public opinion, however, critics attach labels of elitism and arrogance. The most cynical say that governments monitor public opinion to learn how best to influence and manipulate that opinion. However, the problem that leaders face on the issue of how much priority to give to public opinion. According to the Populist perspective, public opinion research has an important role to play in democratic societies because it provides a means for the mass public to participate in and influence government.Carroll J. Glynn [et al] mentions four broad reasons why so many scholars and public officials study and care about public opinion: the legitimacy and stability of governments depend on public support, if citizens withdraw their consent, the government has no legitimate powers; public opinion constrains (or should constrain) political leaders; public opinion provides clues about culture; while political leaders may be constrained by public opinion, they also try to influence it.The word 'the public' grew from its contrasts to other kinds of social formations, most prominently crowds and masses. In the early twentieth century, the new science of 'crowd psychology' (a forerunner of social psychology) developed to explain how individuals could be caught up in mass behavior and transformed. A crowd is commonly defined by its 'unity of emotional experience.' According to contemporary opinion researcher Vincent Price, 'The crowd develops in response to shared emotions.'Crowds are defined by their shared emotional experiences, but masses are defined by their interpersonal isolation. Sociologist Herbert Blumer, states that a mass is composed of anonymous individuals who engage in very little interaction or communication. A mass 'merely consists of an aggregation of individuals who are separate, detached, anonymous,' reacting in response to their own needs.A public emerges and is sustained through discourse over a controversy. Entering a crowd requires only 'the ability to feel and empathize'—to share an emotion—whereas joining the public requires also, 'the ability to think and reason with others.' A public may be influenced by a shared emotional drive, but 'when the public ceases to be critical, it dissolves or is transformed into a crowd,' creates 'public sentiment' rather than public opinion. Unlike a mass, a public is self-aware and interactive.Discussion of public opinion, says Maxwell McCombs, usually centres on the distribution of opinions: how many are for, how many are against, and how many are undecided.Walter Lippmann long ago noted, ‘The world that we have to deal with politically is out of reach, out of sight, out of mind.’ In Walter Lippmann's day, the daily newspaper was the principal source of information about public affairs. Today we have a vastly expanded panoply of communication channels, but the central point is the same. For nearly all of the concerns on the public agenda, citizens deal with a second-hand reality, a reality that is structured by journalists' reports about these events and situations.The daily news alerts us to the latest events and changes in the larger environment beyond our immediate experience. But the news media do considerably more than signal the existence of major events and issues. Through their day-by-day selection and display of the news, journalists focus our attention and influence our perceptions of what are the most important issues of the day. This role of the news media in identifying the key issues and topics of the day and their ability to influence the salience of these issues and topics on the public agenda has come to be called the agenda-setting role of the news media.That is why the news media and many in their audiences, McCombs, are so fascinated with public opinion polls, especially during political campaigns. People have opinions on many things, but only a few topics really matter to them. The agenda-setting role of the news media is their influence on the salience of an issue, an influence on whether a significant number of people regard it as worthwhile to hold an opinion about that issue. While many issues compete for public attention, only a few are successful in doing so, and the news media exert significant influence on our perceptions of what are the most important issues of the day.Now, the question is: Do internet channels of communication have agenda-setting effects among the public? In his study, McCombs mentions that a wide variety of internet channels demonstrate agenda-setting effects among the public similar to those found over the decades since newspapers and television. For example in America, in the 2000 US presidential election, the candidate websites influenced the salience of issues on the public agenda. The salience of racism as an issue increased among participants with high exposure to an experimental website. And candidate websites in a 2010 US Senate election influenced the salience of seven issues among Indianapolis voters.Turning to online news media, the increased salience for an array of national issues among viewers of CNN online and for foreign affairs among participants in an experiment who viewed the New York Times online. In South Korea, two alternative online news services, OhmyNews and PRESSian influenced the salience among the public of the deaths of two schoolgirls by a US military vehicle, an issue that resulted in massive anti-US protests.With the transformation of the communication landscape in recent decades–first cable television and subsequently satellite television among the traditional mass media and now the proliferation of websites and personalized social media–some observers have predicted the diminution, if not the disappearance, of agenda-setting effects in a certain scale.Longstanding interest in the effects of the mass media has frequently been accompanied by a fascination with the relative power of the various communication media to achieve those effects. Agenda-setting has been no exception. Once people understand the basic idea of agenda-setting, they are quick to ask which medium is more powerful in setting the public agenda. In the latter half of the twentieth century, attention was directed particularly at comparisons between newspapers and television. Now the panoply of social media has been added.For the most part, this agenda-setting influence is an inadvertent by- product of the media's necessity to focus on a few topics in the news each day. And a tight focus on a handful of issues by numerous media conveys a strong message to the audience about what are the most important topics of the moment. Agenda-setting directs our attention to the early formative stages of public opinion when issues emerge and first engage public attention, a situation that confronts journalists with a strong ethical responsibility to select carefully the issues on their agenda.There are, of course, a number of other significant influences that shape individual attitudes and public opinion. How we feel about a particular issue may be rooted in our personal experience, the general culture or our exposure to the media. Trends in public opinion are shaped over time by new generations, external events and the communication media. Nonetheless, the general proposition supported by this accumulation of evidence about agenda-setting effects is that journalists do significantly influence their audience's picture of the world.Regardless of agenda-setting, and ‘Fake news’ is nothing new, there something heppenned to the world since 2016, to borrow James Ball's term, the power of bullshit conquered the world: Post-Truth.We will continue this discussion about Post-Truth in the next fragment. Bi 'idhnillah."Then Senduro sang,Is this a place that I call home?To find what I've becomeWalk along the path unknownWe live, we love, we lie *)
Citations & References:
- Carroll J. Glynn, Susan Herbst, Mark Lindeman, Garrett J. O’Keefe & Robert Y. Shapiro, Public Opinion, 2018, Routledge
- Stuart N. Soroka & Christopher Wlezien, Degrees of Democracy: Politics, Public Opinion, and Policy, 2010, Cambridge University Press
- Sherry Devereaux Ferguson, Researching the Public Opinion Environment: Theories and Methods, 2000, Sage Publications
- Edward Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion, 2019, Gildan Media
- Maxwell McCombs, Setting the Agenda: The Mass Media and Public Opinion, 2014, Polity Press
*) "Spectre" written by Alan Walker, Jesper Borgen, Gunnar Greve, Tommy La Verdi, Marcus Arnbekk, Lars Rosness & Anders Froeen
