Short notes on ‘Public Opinion’

Public opinion is the aggregate of individual attitudes or beliefs held by the adult population. Public opinion can also be defined as the complex collection of opinions of many different people and the sum of all their views.

The principle approaches to the study of public opinion may be divided into 4 categories:

1. Quantitative measurement of opinion distributions;

2. Investigation of the internal relationships among the individual opinions that make up public opinion on an issue;

3. Description or analysis of the public role of public opinion;

4. Study both of the communication media that disseminate the ideas on which opinions are based and of the uses those propagandists and other manipulators make of these media.

Concepts of “public opinion research Public opinion as a concept gained credence with the rise of “public” in the eighteenth century. The English term “public opinion” dates back to the eighteenth century and has derived from the French” opinion publique, which was first used in 1588 by Montaigne. This concept came about through the process of urbanization and other political and social forces. For the first time, it became important what people thought, as forms of political contention changed.

Adam Smith, one of the earliest classical economists, refers to public opinion in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, but it was Jeremy Bentham, the famous utilitarian Philosopher, who fully developed theories of public opinion. He opined that public opinion had the power to ensure that rulers would rule for the greatest happiness of the greater number. He brought in Utilitarian philosophy in order to define theories of public opinion.

The German sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies, by using the conceptional tools of his theory of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, argued (1922, “Kritik der offentlichen Meinung”), that ‘public opinion’ has the equivalent social functions in societies (Gesellschaften) which religion has in communities (Gemeinschaften).