7: Public Opinion

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Democracy is meant to be a reflection of the people. The principles of popular sovereignty and majority rule obligate a government to pay attention to what its citizens want. By the same token, they obligate citizens to convey what they want to government. After all, the people cannot have a say in how they are ruled, nor the majority’s preferred course of action be ascertained, unless the public somehow collectively expresses its political views.

Photograph of Cloud Gate, a sculpture in Millennium Park in Chicago, Illinois — Tourists' images are distorted and reflected back at them by Cloud Gate, a sculpture in Chicago's Millennium Park.

But how effective is government based on public opinion anyway? Are the people as a whole capable of sending clear, accurate signals to policymakers about what they want? If so, should policymakers listen? We all like to get what we want, but we also recognize that sometimes what we want isn’t what we need, and that other times we don’t even know what we want.

Before deciding whether or how much government should rely on public opinion, we must answer two more fundamental questions. First, does the public actually have opinions about political issues that could, in principle, be used to chart a course for a democracy? Second, is there a mechanism by which those opinions can be extracted and compiled in such a way as to give government officials an accurate sense of what the public wants them to do?

The answer to both of these questions is a qualified yes. People do have political views, though these views are often less stable than is commonly assumed. And these views are discoverable through sophisticated polling techniques, though even the best polls are limited in their ability to accurately sum up how the populace thinks and feels about political issues. Behind every presidential approval rating or issue poll is a thorny thicket of human psychology and statistical methodology that is both challenging and fascinating to untangle.

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