Susan Herbst Public Opinion Analysis

In order for public opinion to be accurately assessed, a proper definition of the term must first be achieved. While polling and surveys might attempt to conclude what the public’s viewpoints are on a topic, they fail to actually define what public opinion is. Political analysts Blumer, Lippman, Converse, and Herbst each formulate their own viewpoints on public opinion and the role of polling for assessing opinion. Each author views public opinion in a different role and believes that polling plays a varying role in assessing the public. Given all of these authors’ viewpoints, the most appropriate definition of public opinion involves an aggregation of people’s opinions while also looking at how deeply ingrained or informed the opinions are. …show more content…
The categories of public opinion fall as follows: an aggregation of anonymously expressed opinions, a majoritarian viewpoint of opinions that are of most consequence are expressed by the largest number of citizens, a consensus of social norms with an emphasis on communication and bounds of those norms, and reification or a projection of media or elite opinion. In addition, Herbst distinguishes that the definition of public opinion is time-bound, taking on different definitions in different periods of history. Over time, Herbst notes, assessments of public opinion have shifted from printing to strikes, to straw polls, to newspapers, to surveys, and most recently to …show more content…
Herbst’s categories of public opinion, when considered in a holistic perspective, seem to form the most general concept of public opinion. Public opinion is an aggregation of people’s opinions that are most significant to the public. This definition takes on a more general definition that Blumer is looking for without the reliance of polling. Of course, the issue of actually gauging what public opinion is comes up in this definition. Converse addresses this concern accurately, though; while polling does have flaws, it is likely the most efficient system available to public opinion analysts. If polling does have flaws in measuring public opinion, then one might think of combining polling with other measures to predict more accurate views on the public’s opinion. Herbst provides an interesting recant of various public opinion techniques throughout history, and some of the techniques she mentions - newspapers, surveys, and demonstrations - can be combined with polls to produce accurate results of looking at public opinion. To address Converse’s concern that public opinion does not measure people’s engagement with issues, an appropriate countermeasure could be deliberative polls mentioned by Erikson and Tedin. Deliberative polls or discussion-based polls could be used to determine people’s engagement and ability to formulate