(1972-1997) Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland. Stuttgart: Klett. Eisenstein E (1979) The Printing ...
Legitimating reason or self-created uncertainty? Public opinion as an observer of modern politics Giancarlo Corsi (Dep. Of Communication and Economy), University of ModenaReggio Emilia, I Public opinion as a sociological concept The subject of public opinion has certainly been extensively studied by sociology and political science, but an abstract definition of it, or at least one that can be generalized, has rarely been reached. Most contributions focus on everything connected with surveys, polling and statistical analysis and on public and journalistic discussion of the data, in the kinds of studies which probably do not even require a theoretical interest in the subject. On balance, the following observation made by Herbert Blumer several decades ago is still valid: “There is no effort, seemingly, to try to identify or to isolate public opinion as an object” and further, there is “a paucity, if not a complete absence, of generalizations about public opinion despite the voluminous amount of polling studies” (1948: 542). This assessment has also been shared in more recent times (Herbst 1993: 438).
There is no shortage of studies on particular aspects of the public sphere which have contributed to demarcating the concept, including prejudice, the bandwagon effect and many others besides. But in these cases, too, a general definition of public opinion is lacking. It is clear from the academic literature that when it comes to defining what public opinion “actually is” scholars continue to rely heavily on citations from critical theory and the seminal work conducted by Jürgen Habermas (1962/1991). His basic argument is that, with modernity, a public sphere has developed which is independent from the traditional hierarchical structure, and within which for the first time in history it is possible to take a position on any public issue freely, independently of particular interests and of economic and political conditioning. Hence, according to Habermas, this is the sole true source of “modern rationality” and thus also the only possible source of legitimation of political decisions. Another theoretical framework, which is radically different from the one formulated by Habermas, comes from systems theory (Luhmann 2000: 274-318). Little known in the English-speaking world, this approach is highly particular and abstract. On the one hand, it considers public opinion as the “social space” in which the most important themes and contributions for political discussions – and thus also for the agenda of decision-makers – are constructed; on the other, it holds that any policy proposal has
to prove its worth to this anonymous observer, which – especially through elections – will sanction its success or failure. These two theoretical frameworks, while diverging in their theoretical assumptions and consequences, have several elements in common, including the idea that public opinion is both a new historical phenomenon and a key factor in modern politics. Setting out from these two contributions, I will argue that the political system, just like any other system, cannot operate with reference exclusively to itself – this would mean not so much the imposition of a system of dominance but rather the collapse of the system and its operational paralysis. The political system has to expose itself to some form of uncertainty which it cannot control, and only by doing that is it able to operate and construct more or less complex structures. In modern society, the traditional external sources of uncertainty (God, nature, the innate virtue of the best, etc.) have been supplanted by public opinion, in the various forms it takes today (the people, the electorate, forms of citizenship, etc.), which generates specific forms of uncertainty that go beyond institutional events such as elections.
Public Opinion as a historical product From a historical-evolutionary perspective, we know that the expression “public opinion” did not come into being until the 18th century. This new development can be analyzed from at least three perspectives: the semantic shift in the idea of the “people” and the “public”, the development of previously unknown opportunities for discussion, and the decisive role played by the invention of the printing press. In the medieval tradition, the meaning of terms like people, public and opinion reflected the hierarchical structure of society in that period. The people, as opposed to the nobility, and communis opinio tended to be seen in a negative light, as an aggregate to be kept under control. The nobility viewed the people as something unstable, if not insolent and ultimately pitiable, constantly grumbling against the state (Farge 1992: 30 ff.). By contrast, the term publicus, more accurately defined, meant anything that is open, shared, visible and for all to see, as distinct from privatus, namely that which is secret, in a morally dubious sense (Hölscher 1997). According to other interpretations that focussed on the ancient meaning of the word, publicus was concerned with the polis as distinct from the household (Brunner et al. 1972-1997: original term öffentlich). It was not until the 17th century that these distinctions were replaced by the modern understanding of public as opposed to private, where ‘public’ stood for the institutions, the state and public authorities, while ‘private’ stood for
trading, and ultimately the individual. The following century saw the coining of the expression “public opinion”, which lost its negative moral connotations and went on to become the “universal tribunal before which citizens and governments alike must appear” (Peters 1995: 6). This development was noted and analyzed by Habermas in his seminal book on public opinion. According to Habermas, taking advantage of commercial networks and furthering their economic interests now free from status-related differences, the bourgeois classes created new spaces of social interaction, such as Britain’s coffee houses, France’s salons and Germany’s Tischgesellschaften. In principle, in these forums it was possible to discuss any subject, including art, news items, current affairs and politics, focussing on the various topics and not on the social background of the participants. The phenomenon also became important for power-holders since the participants included individuals with varying degrees of influence on the life of the city and on administrative choices. This marked the birth of the modern public sphere (Öffentlichkeit), namely a network of discussion among people with shared interests and ideas, which ignored differences in social status and allowed relatively free access to “cultural products”, thereby creating an audience of readers, listeners and spectators (Habermas 1962/1991: 27 ff.). From a state of “incoherent homogeneity”
(Spencer 1898: 584), the public sphere became a discerning observer that politics had to reckon with. Finally, the invention and diffusion of the printing press, which radically transformed old institutions and customs, probably played a decisive role in this process. Although Habermas does not emphasize this particular aspect, a number of scholars draw on his ideas in order to underscore its importance. Two cases that are particularly interesting in this respect will be considered here. The first concerns the English Petition of Right system (Zaret 1996). The procedure had existed for centuries and gave people the opportunity to submit their grievances to the Lords or the King. Until the 17th century these petitions were largely of a personal nature and certainly not public, and hence were not conceived or written with a view to being discussed in the street or the marketplace (Zaret 1996: 1499). But suddenly, with the diffusion of the printing press, they were printed and disseminated for a clearly different use, especially to stir up popular support for the initiatives of certain parliamentary leaders and to discuss and criticize the petitions of political adversaries. Thus, not only did secrecy disappear but the contents changed, too, with the result that the number of petitions increased greatly and readers were encouraged to take part in disputes, particularly between the king and parliament, which at the time were very frequent and fierce, and between factions, stimulating debates and discussions.
The recipients of the petitions were no longer just the ministers or the king: now they were addressed to a permanent public audience, a “virtual community of readers” (Zaret 2000: 133) from which the petitions might or might not gain popular recognition and legitimation. The idea of the individual, now no longer based on social background but on the ability to take part in public communication, also changed in a modern sense (Eisenstein 1979: 144). The second case refers to the French tradition of the so-called nouvelles à la main, already widespread from the early 16th century (Farge 1992). These were originally handwritten texts, mostly anonymous, inaccurate and unverifiable, unreliable from a journalistic point of view, and exclusively designed to create rumours and confusion and to cause unrest. But from then on until the Revolution, these texts – now printed – aroused particular attention among the authorities, which set up a police department tasked with collecting and reading them, not to check their reliability but to understand what people were talking about, and expressed surprise as well as anxiety in the gazettes of the day, finding it odd that the most ordinary and low-class people had acquired the habit of participating in discussions and forming their own opinions through relatively elaborate arguments (Farge 1992: 289-290). Clearly the people were no longer just an indistinct and uncultivated mass but an observer of public life.
In this respect, there is no doubt that the printed press was a powerful accelerator of changes that were already underway and which shattered the underpinnings of the traditional European order, including first and foremost the secrecy of political actions within the royal court, limited access to any kind of literary production, social origin (and not competency) as the criterion for evaluating individuals and legitimating the social hierarchy, and so on. To sum up, we might say that with the advent of modernity social differences no longer made any difference to politics, and political decision-making processes now had to take into account the views of the people. Politics had to take this new “observer” increasingly into consideration while institutional forms which today are regarded as standard gradually became established, notably the legitimacy of dissent, political success or failure determined primarily by elections, and democratization chiefly underpinned by the institutionalization of parliaments, based on right/left, conservatives/progressives and government/opposition structures, of political organizations such as parties that continue to exist regardless of election outcomes, and so on (Luhmann 1999). Political action was now effectively decision-based; it was publicly visible and therefore always discussed and debatable: the ruling government had to be convincing vis-à-vis the outside – vis-à-vis this evanescent yet inescapable “judge” that is public opinion.
On this point, critical theory and systems theory are not too dissimilar insofar as the factors of change which they view as having led to the invention of public opinion and to its central role in modern politics are more or less the same for both. What sets the theories apart is their answer to the question: what is the function of public opinion? Critical theory vs systems theory: legitimacy through consensus or second order observation? Their answers are indeed divergent. To Habermas the main problem is the possibility of free discussion, in the sense of it not being externally conditioned by politics, economics, or any other factors, such as today’s mass media and “cultureconsuming public”, for instance (Habermas 1962/1991: 159 ff.). Historically, this possibility was provided by the birth of the “bourgeois public sphere”, in which political power could be observed and criticized through free discussion by free citizens. Habermas sets out from the assumption that today it is no longer possible to establish any form of rationality or any form of truth in a natural way. Hence, the only way to act in a rational manner or to communicate on the basis of some kind of truth is through the potential consensus of anyone else, the ideal speech situation, “discourse”, a communicative action that allows agreement to be reached without conditioning: he thus proposes a consensus theory of truth (Luhmann and Habermas
1971: 67-94). Only on this basis is it possible to conduct an ongoing critique of the dominant system’s apparatus, that is, by excluding the systematic distortion of communication. Communicative rationality and consensual truth are consequently foundational for all possibility of legitimating social systems, obviously including the political system and political institutions. Legitimation cannot arise from social systems but only from Lifeworlds (Lebenswelten), namely from the “transcendental” condition of all social relations (Habermas 1981, vol 2: 912). The absence of this leads to the crisis of legitimation which characterizes contemporary society (Habermas 1973: 50 ff.). The concept of public opinion put forward by systems theory is entirely different. Firstly, in a well known and widely discussed thesis, Luhmann argues that public opinion does not perform the function of legitimation, which in his view is performed by procedures (Luhmann 1969/1983)1. Instead, Luhmann ascribes to public opinion the 1
According to Luhmann the legitimacy of political decisions cannot be deduced from values,
principles or factors that are external to politics – this would be the equivalent of an ethical state and thus, ultimately, of a dictatorship. The criteria of legitimacy for political decisions can only be established by administrative and organizational procedures, as is true to a greater or lesser extent of all parliaments which we would call democratic today. On this shift from “substantive” to procedural criteria, see his precursor Herbert Simon (1976).
function of generating themes, bringing to them wide-ranging and divergent contributions (Luhmann 1970). This does not imply that the decision-making possibilities in politics, or political “visions”, come exclusively from public opinion. But what it makes sense to propose from a decision-making point of view must have the possibility of meeting with public consensus or interest, and politics cannot fail to take this into account. Moreover, this very possibility of stimulating divergent opinions on any theme brings with it an uncertainty that cannot be eliminated from politics, and which, on the contrary, lies at the very heart of the idea of democracy. Thus for every decision there are always alternatives, and for this reason political opposition today enjoys the same degree of legitimacy as the government in power (Luhmann 1989). Luhmann develops this idea by using the rather complex concept of second order observation (Luhmann 1992). From a sociological perspective, this concept implies first and foremost that, with modernity, society has to forego the traditional external determinants of action (and not exclusively political action), such as nature, virtue or God. No matter how a decision may be assessed, one can only refer to internal factors, especially the decision-maker’s reasons and interests, no matter how these may be imagined or construed within the various subsystems in society and within the public sphere. This is not only true of the political system but also of all the subsystems in modern society, of individuals and of organizations. Thus, modern law is positive law, it
is decision-based law and no longer natural law, and in order to understand the meaning of laws, rulings and contracts, the focus of observation should be on decisionmakers and not on nature. Similarly, the economy is based on the market, as a sort of mirror in which all the actors observe both what is happening and the observations of others, and this is the only way that makes it possible or otherwise to have transactions (White 1981). And likewise in science, one can no longer refer to objective truth but must refer instead to existing publications and connect to research that has already been conducted2. What is produced in the public sphere is thus the result of an enormous quantity of observations of observations without any ultimate foundation, continuously generating bifurcations and “frames” within which each individual takes a position. For this reason, among others, the public sphere is wholly unstable and uncontrollable, with very strong swings from keen interest to indifference, with fashion trends and new ideas, controversies and enthusiasms, and reactions and counter-reactions. In politics this means that those who take decisions, or rather, anyone who publicly observes events, is in turn observed from a dual perspective, one based on what they 2
On the law, see Febbrajo and Corsi (2016: 11 ff.); on the economy, see Esposito (2011); on science,
see Esposito (2005).
state (deciding or even just analyzing and observing) and the reasons they adduce (for instance values, but even a claim to scientific or journalistic neutrality), and one on the interests they are presumed to be driven by. Public opinion always assumes that statements and reasons do not coincide. Good communicators are therefore those who know how to move between these two extremes, realizing that they can avoid neither the former nor the latter. This point highlights what is arguably the greatest difference between critical theory and systems theory. Habermas views public opinion as providing the possibility of a public discourse that could lead to a consensus based on the rational validity of the arguments put forward, and no scientific theory can claim to be neutral. In Luhmann’s view, by contrast, today it is no longer possible to expect either to have general reasons that are valid for all, or to have a generalized consensus of the observers on how to decide and the reasons for deciding. On the contrary, second order observation actually imposes the difference between consensus and dissent as the main frame of reference for the political system. To Luhmann (1992) this is a kind of civilizing achievement: through public opinion as second order observation, the difference between consensus and coercion (violence) - inherent in any political power - is “hidden” by the difference between consensus and dissent, thereby generating a much greater degree of complexity in decision-making potential than in previous eras,
albeit without any guarantee of “rationality” and without “best arguments”. This is equally true of scientific theories and hence also of systems theory. Thus, no one can say what the reality or what the truth is, one can only try to construct a “good argument”, choosing the initial distinctions with a great deal of care. The selection and development of the theories is then entrusted to the network of publications and to the potential of the ideas themselves to elicit responses and reactions. There are many aspects that fuel this theoretical contraposition3. With respect to public opinion, the most important of them concerns one of the classic problems of political theory: namely the limitation of power.
3
One of these is the “self-implication” of the observer. Whereas systems theory has been explicitly
constructed in a circular fashion, albeit certainly not without its problems, critical theory cannot be applied to itself without ending up in a “logical” short circuit, since the critical theorist necessarily has to claim that he lies outside of the society to which his critique is addressed. This is already clear in the case of Marx, in whose work society is seen as the conflict between the owners of the means of production and the workforce – but Marx is neither of these two. In the case of Habermas, society is seen as a contraposition between lifeworlds and social systems – but Habermas is neither one nor the other. A traditional way to overcome this problem was to introduce the figure of the intellectual who stood above the observers. In my view, however, no one could use this strategy today. For an attempt
Self-produced uncertainty as autonomy The question of limiting and exercising control over political power is an old and thorny one, and here we will confine ourselves to asking what role public opinion plays in this regard. The two theories we are comparing share the view that the holders of political power cannot impose limitations on themselves directly, not because this would be negative (in a political or moral sense) but because it would bring political action to a standstill. Any power that was to say, “I decide how I decide because I decide how I decide,” would simply end up not knowing what or how to decide anymore4. For this reason, the political system (like any other social system) has to make itself dependent on factors which it cannot control, and one of these factors, perhaps the most important one today, is public opinion. Public opinion cannot be controlled because, through the mass media, it continuously generates schemas,
to reconcile critical theory and systems theory by resolving (or avoiding?) this problem, see Amstutz and Fischer-Lescano (2013). 4
Not that this could not happen anyway, but the tragicomical aspects of many dictatorships over the
last century (such as today’s North Korea, for example) show what price would have to be paid for it.
distinctions and scripts within which it constantly swings in favour of and against any topic being debated. This creates ongoing uncertainty as to which ideas or which decision-making programmes might meet with consensus – and no politician or political party can be certain in this respect. Critical theory sees this as providing the possibility (as yet unfulfilled?) to hold discussions without any conditioning, whereas systems theory merely sees constantly changing themes and contributions on which political actors are required to take a stance. Either way, society generates the most diverse types of issues that have to be tackled politically, and at the same time provides no guarantees as to the success of the possible solutions being offered. In this sense, the uncertainty produced through public opinion is not independent from politics; it is not something extra-societal or “neutral”. It is an uncertainty produced by the policy-makers themselves when they communicate programmes or decisions and the associated reasons for them, thereby testing the electorate’s reactions. Public opinion is the product of second order observation of the political system, and it limits political power in the sense that not everything that would be politically possible also has the potential to gain consensus in elections. Conversely, by limiting policy-making possibilities, public opinion stimulates the imagination of politicians – something that does not necessarily exclude negative or non democratic
backsliding, albeit endorsed by public opinion. There are certainly historical examples of this in the 20th century. Precisely because public opinion is not independent, it continually reflects what goes on in the political debate. This is why talking about how public opinion can be influenced or manipulated is not particularly useful. Public opinion is constantly, and at times even heavily, influenced by the way topics of discussion are selected or even hidden in a targeted manner, for instance. But even if this were easy to do in a society that has access to all kinds of media, it would still be impossible to shape public opinion, and the political risks of censure or secrecy where important decisions are involved are very high. We can reformulate this thesis on a more abstract theoretical level by stating, in the language of systems theory, that this uncertainty, which is both self-created by politicians and uncontrollable, is useful to prevent the short-circuit created by the system’s self-reference, in our case where political power controls and legitimates itself. Self-reference needs to be externalized (Luhmann 1981: 68), and, once again, not because it would be bad not to do so, but because otherwise the political system would end up falling silent and no longer knowing what to say. This is a paradox: the political system is autonomous at the decisional level, and in this respect all we can say is that “it decides how it decides”, because only politicians can take political decisions.
But in terms of decision-making contents, i.e. the issues to be discussed, the agendas to be set, the values to be defended and the reasons to be adduced, politics is dependent on public opinion because that is where it has to assert itself. In other words, through public opinion, arbitrary decisions are transformed into “reasoned” decisions, which make more or less sense and are thus inevitable and debatable at the same time. This problem of externalization is certainly not confined to the political sphere. All subsystems in modern society somehow need to find “non arbitrary” foundations for their actions and structures, and each naturally tackles this in its own way. Let us look at a few examples. In law there are at least two possibilities: on the one hand lawmaking is delegated to political institutions since laws are largely made by parliaments, and in return the law retains its autonomy through court rulings. On the other hand, even this autonomy is made asymmetrical by means of very sophisticated instruments, including by creating an artificial ambiguity that the law cannot control, for example (Weick 1995: 103). In court, the different parties to the case in hand have an equal opportunity to adduce arguments, and many cases, moreover, involve the use of citizens’ juries with the right to decide without any external interference. This seems like a small-scale version of what Habermas calls free discussion among equals. In this
fashion, the law adapts itself to the conditions of second order observation: in order to make sense of a ruling we have to observe the legislator or the judges. In economics, the mechanism of market competition can be seen as an equivalent of this, including the particular case of financial markets and the stock exchange, which play on the perception of simultaneous competition and where the possible decisions of other investors determine whether or not a decision makes sense (to invest, for example). This comes very close to the ancient practice of divination (Esposito 2011: ??). In science, publications are the equivalent of public opinion and, at the procedural level, uncertainty is produced through experiments, i.e. extremely artificial situations whose outcomes create unpredictable bifurcations. Here too, self-created uncertainty is necessary in order to prevent the short-circuiting of science, which cannot simply say: reality is what it is. Such parallels can be drawn for all subsystems in modern society. The autonomy of these systems can only be guaranteed if they are able to create uncertainty with respect to what can create a response in the public sphere. From this perspective, the role of the mass media is absolutely crucial because it is only by disproportionately increasing the possibility of communicating that the decision-making potential can also increase. It seems that even Habermas agrees on this point: if there is no adequate
public discussion, then we must develop the structures of communication and see what happens5. Concluding remarks We can conclude with an observation concerning current events. Public opinion constructs its schemas in a circular relationship with the mass media and politics: the mass media introduce themes that are expected to be of interest for public discussion, and public opinion discriminates according to criteria that may sometimes be clear and other times mysterious but which are always unpredictable in terms of their concrete effects. Politics enters into this circle with its decisions, and exposes itself to swings between consensus and dissent. This circularity also applies to what observers see when they observe how they are being observed, and what they see is the adoption of stances that reveal various kinds 5
Habermas’s position on this is not always clear. In an exchange with Dieter Grimm on the possibility
of a European constitution, he argues that a legitimating European public opinion can be stimulated by the homogenization (linguistic, cultural and institutional) of the mass media and, through the mass media, by the homogenization of public opinion (Habermas 1996). It therefore seems that social systems can contribute to the formation of lifeworlds, an idea which at first glance does not seem to be entirely consistent with his theoretical framework.
of expectations. What we have defined as self-produced uncertainty can be detected at this level, too, as it is never possible to know with certainty whether expectations will be fulfilled – be they the expectations of the electorate, of politicians, of newspapers, of television, of social media, of blogs and so on. Certain major political events that have recently occurred can provide useful lessons on these mechanisms. We are specifically referring to the election of Donald Trump in the United States and to the two European referendums, on “Brexit” and on the constitutional reforms proposed by the Italian government, in 2016. In all these cases, one is under the impression that the electorate reacted not so much to the contents of the proposed programmes as to the way in which the electorate itself was being represented in the mass media and in public opinion. It is as if the observers had decided to frustrate expectations as to how they would behave, without focussing too much on the contents of the proposals themselves. This is clearly illustrated by the comments on these election and referendum results, all manifestly paradoxical: a vote against the establishment that resulted in the election of one of the most typical representatives of the establishment, a vote against the problems generated by the European Union in one of the countries that is least affected by them, and a vote not to violate a constitution which actually states not only that it can be changed but also how it can be changed.
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