Public Opinion as a Discursive Process

Christian Baden, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
c.baden@mail.huji.ac.il

Public Opinion as a Discursive Process conceives of public opinion as an outcome of the public debate about an issue. It circumscribes the range of interpretations and stances toward an issue that prevail in the public debate among members of the public: Positions are inserted into the public debate by any speaker with access to the public arena, where they are endorsed, elaborated, challenged, or re-negotiated by other speakers in a dynamic process. Participants continuously renegotiate what issues are of public relevance, how they can be conceptualised, and how they should be evaluated. In the course of this process, some ideas and opinions emerge as widely-agreed upon or recognised as legitimate within an accepted corridor of opinions or opinion climate, while others are demarcated as contested or face delegitimation. Accordingly, public opinion appears as a collaborative social construction that is directly accessible to researchers and members of the public alike by means of studying the contents of public discourse, or indirectly via people’s subjective perceptions of public opinion negotiations in public discourse (as perceived public opinion climates).

A key challenge in this conceptualisation of public opinion concerns the need to determine which contributions to the public debate matter, and how much weight to attribute to them. If earlier scholarship could focus on key institutional arenas (notably, parliamentary discourse, legacy mass media), the growth of digital media has blurred the lines between salient, widely influential sites and voices (‘opinion leaders’), and others whose impact upon public opinion is less certain.

Public Opinion as a Discursive Process is typically studied using qualitative discourse, and quantitative content-analytic methods, and increasingly also computational methods. A key limitation, especially of computational approaches, is their strong sensitivity to uneven content availability and strategic manipulations of the visibility of certain opinions. Also, the approach permits no conclusions about the statistical distribution of opinions, as held opinions are likely to be expressed in public differently.

Keywords: negotiation, public discourse, public opinion climate

References:
Baden, C., Kligler-Vilenchik, N., Springer. N., Jungblut, M., Zelenkauskaite, A., Balčytienė, A., Salgado, S., Lipiński, A., Krstić, A., & Bączkowska, A. (under review). Public opinion negotiations in a digital media ecosystem: A conceptual framework. International Journal of Public Opinion Research.
Crespi, I. (1997). The public opinion process: How the people speak. Routledge.
Lasswell, H. D. (1931). The measurement of public opinion. American Political Science Review, 25(2), 311-326. https://doi.org/10.2307/1947659