Reading Public Opinion: How Political Actors View the Democratic Process

by Susan Herbst

Book Overview

Public opinion is one of the most elusive and complex concepts in democratic theory, and we do not fully understand its role in the political process. Reading Public Opinion offers one provocative approach for understanding how public opinion fits into the empirical world of politics. In fact, Susan Herbst finds that public opinion, surprisingly, has little to do with the mass public in many instances.

Herbst draws on ideas from political...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226327477
• ISBN13: 9780226327471
• Release Date: October 1998
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 266 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.3" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Some comments on the previous reviewer

The book is interesting and intriguing in that it provides a different look at how different people think public opinion. Some of the comments made by the previous online reviewer are contestable. She argues that "who cares about how political actors think." Obviously, everyone who is an interested in the relationship between public opinion and the democratic processes should care about how people occupying strategic positions in the political system - that is, political activists and journalists - think about public opinion. She says that if she asked her grandma about public opinion and the answer would be equally intriguing. Actually Prof Herbst will agree with this point since understanding how common people think about public opinion itself is an interesting and important question. It provides insights into the political culture of a society. Though Prof Herbst did not study common people's conception of public opinion in this book, she had done such research elsewhere. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argues that "public opinion does not exist," that is, the ideal version of public opinion - a single unified public providing their opinion as an autonomous force directing government policy - does not exist. However, public opinion remains a concept that people, politicians, and scholars in a democratic society talk about so often. Thus, it would be important for people to think about how different people in the society understand the term, and it is to this aspect that Prof Herbst recent work contributes.