Reading Public Opinion: How Political Actors View the Democratic Process

Abstract

"Reading Public Opinion: How Political Actors View the Democratic Process" by Susan Herbst is reviewed.

Reading Public Opinion: How Political Actors View the Democratic Process. By Susan Herbst. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. x, 256 pp. Cloth, $41.00, ISBN 0-226-327469. Paper, $16.00, ISBN 0-226-32747-7.)

Susan Herbst is a pioneer in the study of public opinion. Her latest contribution, Reading Public Opinion, studies the "lay theories" of democracy implicit in how "political actors" talk about public opinion. It reveals a fascinating diversity of views about what public opinion means and how it influences politics.

Herbst treats public opinion as a "contested and malleable concept"-as something that is "socially constructed" in ways that have "vital implications for democratic theory and practice." In the first chapter, she elaborates on the forces that "construct" public opinion in particular contexts: prevailing models of democracy, the methods of opinion measurement, the rhetoric of political leaders, and journalistic interpretations. For Herbst, public opinion is not mass consciousness to be investigated only through surveys. Rather, it is a sort of "folk psychology" manifested in people's arguments about the public sphere.

The next three chapters reveal how various groups of political actors talked about public opinion in unstructured interviews and an open-ended survey. Committee staffers in the Illinois legislature tended to equate public opinion with the rhetoric of interest groups and mass media. Political journalists spoke about everyday conversations and an imagined audience for their reporting. The third group, party activists, thought more about polls, but "conversation . . . within their social network" provided "the real color and texture" for their portraits of public opinion. Each of these tendencies, Herbst concludes, was tied to the respondents' occupations and their "place in the social matrix."

In her conclusion, Herbst explores the implications of differing, even competing, "lay theories" of public opinion for democratic theory and scholarly research. She notes that the party activists were the "most classically democratic group," while legislative aides and journalists had more elitist, even cynical, views. Herbst then relates her work to some "classics" in political science and argues for more attention to mass media and other alternative measures of public opinion.

Herbst occasionally writes as if snake-bitten by criticisms of her earlier work as "an antiquantitative, even Luddite assault" on polling. She even promises to avoid the "normative debate about polls themselves." Combined with her focus on state-level politics, the result is a reassuring view of a democracy uncorrupted by polling. There are no Bill Clintons in Read ing Public Opinion, deciding what to do and say based on continuous polling, nor do local media spend millions on bogus polls and trumpet the results as "news." Herbst presents Illinois as a "microcosm" of national politics, but she concedes one big difference: compared to Washington, Springfield is a "land without polls."

Reading Public Opinion is an innovative and important book that contributes significantly to efforts to develop broader and richer conceptualizations of public opinion. The book may sidestep the dangers of equating public opinion with polls, but it does point to some alternatives. Herbst may be a lonely voice in the paint-by-numbers world of opinion research, but her work resonates with what historians and communication scholars have long sensed: that the richness of vox populi cannot be captured by categorical percentages.