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Public Opinion and Political Communication

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Introduction

The primacy of communication in every system is definite and convincing. It is the livewire that ensures the survival and/or the usefulness of the system. Accordingly, a typical political system needs political communication for its survival and utility. In this regard, a political system maintains constant correspondence with its environment in an input-output relationship, and keeps track of the effects of its output through the feedback mechanisms. The matrix of the political communication between the political system and its environment manifests among other things as public opinion. It follows therefore to mean that public opinion is a subset of the mother political communication. But on the face value however, public opinion and political communication can be mistaken to belong to the environment and the political system respectively. Public opinion is indeed an exclusive thing of the environment, but the political system cannot lay exclusive claim to political communication. It is safe therefore to say that every public opinion is a political communication but not every political communication is a public opinion. At this juncture, discussing the concepts of political communication and public opinion has become imperative.

Clarifying Political Communication

The etymology of the word, communication spanned from the Latinists’ communicare, communicatio, which means “to share”, through the Old French communicacion, to today’s English in which it simply means the process of imparting or exchanging information. This process of imparting and exchanging information named communication turns political communication once it has to do with “the seizure, use and consolidation of state power,” (Nnoli 1986), that is, when the communication has to do with politics. Along this thought, Annusewicz and Bejma quoted in Giemza (2014), see political communication as an exchange of political ideas and information on politics. This definition clearly delimited political communication from other forms of communications in a way that suggests that a communication is political only when it has to do with politics. But, that is not the whole truth because any attempt to establishing a divide between politics and other sectors of the society is an exercise in futility. Be that as it may, this position is not to suggest that every communication in the society can pass as political communication. Political communication is distinguishable from other forms of communication by its actors and intention. If the actor of the communication is either the politics, the public, the media or all of them, and the intention is political, then, it is political communication. This explains why political communication as a sub-field of Political Science deals with the study of the media, analysis of the speeches of politicians, and measurement of public opinion.

Actors of Political Communication 

Political communication has three main actors: the politics, the media, and the citizens. Mazzoleni (2012, p. 3) delineated the actors further thus:
i Political System: i. Institutional actors: parliament, central and local government, judiciary, head of state.

ii Non institutional actors: parties, social movements, interest groups.
iii Media System: TV, radio, press, books, cinema, new media.

iv Citizenship: Single people, public opinion, electorate.

These actors interact with each other, exchanging information in order to inform, persuade, promote, and even influence their target in those activities, directly or indirectly associated with seizure, use and consolidation of state power. This interaction “can take place in a variety of forms (formal or informal), in a variety of venues (public and private), and through a variety of mediums (mediated or unmediated content)” (Small, Giasson, Marland, 2014, p. 4).

Trades of Political Communication

The trades of communication between the actors of political communication is variegated and mutual. The flow could be downward from political actors to citizens; horizontally between political actors, including news media; and upward from citizens and groups to the political institutions (Norris 2001 quoted in Giemza 2014). This resulted in a variegated trades of political communication.

1.      From Politics to Media: This includes regulations, news management, and politics as a source of media content.

2.      From Politics to Citizenship: This includes public communication, personal relationships, and electoral ads.

3.      From Citizenship to Politics: This includes voting, public debate, direct relationships, polls and surveys.

4.      From Media to Politics: This includes general information, watchdog journalism, partisan information, and mediatisation.

5.      From Media to Citizenship: This includes general information, partisan information, and political advertising.

6.      From Citizenship to Media: This includes exit from a TV or a journal, and citizen journalism.

Periods of Political Communication
Political communication has undergone several changes overtime. Scholars categorized the changes into three periods (Giemza, 2014). In the first period, political communication such as rallies, canvassing, and meetings were face to face. Nolan (1981) quoted in Giemza (2014) cited the instance where the former Canadian Prime Minister, John A. Macdonald in 1878 started the first “campaign picnic” in a bid to present himself as amiable and accessible to people rather than a distant politician. Newspapers were also available at this period. When Guglielmo Marconi invented radio in 1895, it was also employed in political communication at this original stage. The second period started in 1950s following the emergence of television in the world of broadcast media. It brought new dimensions to politics, including a predisposition  toward  the  visual,  the  dramatic,  and  mass  appeal  (Taras  1990 quoted in Giemza 2014). Political communication today is in its third period. This period is marked with multiplicity of channels of communication due to technological advancements. In the words of Giemza (2014, p. 6), “cable and  satellite  technology  have  extended  the  options  available  to  viewers,  which results in audience fragmentation. Digital technologies, including the Internet, mobile technologies and related applications, have furthered this fragmentation.” The implication of this development is that the classic media no longer bestride the world of information dissemination like the Colossus of Rhodes. It is however worthy of mention that the new period of political communication did not displace the old periods; they existed side by side. Television advertising for instance, has not replaced print or radio ads, and the Internet has replaced none of these.




Defining Public Opinion

The definition of public opinion has been an object of intense intellectual contestation. The problem lies in what actually constitutes the public. In one instance, the public is portrayed as the generality or the majority of the masses; and in another instance, it is shown as the concerned individuals that interact with each other. This divergence in the constitution of the public makes the definition of public opinion highly controversial. This controversy is what Deering (n.d) evaded when she defined public opinion as what the public thinks about a particular issue, party, or individual political figure. She skirted the need for telling the composition of the public. It is worthy of note however that the public thought in the definition is not public opinion until it is given verbal or non-verbal expression.

The controversy in the definition of public opinion notwithstanding, the concept’s association with democracy shows that public opinion is the aggregate of similar views held by the majority of the citizens, the concerned population that interact with each other. According to Dahlgren (2005), it  is  imperative not  to  lose  sight  of  the  classic  idea  that  democracy  resides,  ultimately,  with  citizens  who engage  in  talk  with  each  other.  In this line of thought, public opinion can safely be called popular opinion in a democracy. This explains why elections, referenda, and opinion polls tower among the measures of public opinion. These measures of public opinion are designed to indicate popular views on matters of interest such as political, social, and economic issues.

Public opinion commands strong influence in government and politics especially as it concerns policy formulations and implementations. Public opinion for instance, informed the transformation of the original thirteen American British colonies into what is known today as the United States of America. In France, the middle classes and the urban masses were inspired by public opinion into the 1789 Revolution sweeping monarchism away from the country.

Methods of Measuring Public Opinion

Various groups can be quite interested in public opinion, but in the ranks of those groups, government tops the chart. This is understandable as government legitimacy requires popular consent, thereby implying that there ought to be a high degree of harmony or congruence between government policy and public opinion.

The foremost known attempt to the measurement of public opinion is often believed to be the local “straw” vote conducted in United States in 1824 by the Harrisburg Pennsylvanian newspaper regarding whether Andrew Jackson or John Quincy Adams was the preferred presidential candidate (Macreadie, 2011). A  straw  poll  refers  to  an  informal  ballot  conducted  locally  to  test  opinion.  Unlike most modern opinion polling, which uses random sampling, straw votes use non-probability sampling, and remain popular in some states in the US. The adoption of random sampling by George Gallup in 1936 in which it correctly predicted Roosevelt victory over Langdon launched his brand as the most popular opinion poll group in the United States. The pollster argued that a chef needed not to taste every bit of the soup to know that he needed more spice, likewise a pollster needed not to poll every member of the population to know public opinion.

Public opinion on issues of concern can be captured using different methods. The methods can be categorized into structured and unstructured methods of measuring public opinion. The structured methods are those methods that measure public opinion in a systematic manner. This method features elections, opinion polls, referenda, sample surveys, in-depth interviews, and focus groups. The unstructured methods of measuring public opinion are spontaneous and instinctive. They include protests, media agenda, interest groups and lobbying, etc.

Public Opinion and Political Communication

A functioning political system is simply an  assemblage  of  communicative  spaces  that  permit  the  exchange  of  information,  ideas,  debates (ideally  in  an  unbound  fashion) and  also  the  formation  of  public opinion as it concerns all those activities, directly or indirectly associated with seizure, use and consolidation of state power. Or as David Easton would say, the system of interaction in which authoritative allocation of values are made and implemented (Easton 1953). These range of communications or interactions in a political system are epitomized by what is known as public opinion and political communication. They are more or less the two sides of a coin, and also influence each other. For instance, someone’s opinions about issues affecting the world around him is a lifelong process that social scientists call political socialization, while political communication is the mother of political socialization. It follows therefore to mean that political communication is the mother of public opinion. On the other hand, public opinion is not only an arm of political communication, it is largely a determinant of the content and character of political communication.

The interactions in the political system therefore is between public opinion (the environment) and political communication (the political system), and are mediated by the media. This shows that there is a very strong relationship between public opinion and political communication, and this relationship is germane to the survival of the political system. Hence, David Easton while describing the Feedback Loop of his Systems Analysis argued that the capacity of a system to persist in the face of stress is a function of the presence and nature of the information and other influences that return to its actors and decision-makers (Easton 1965). Public opinion thus, is the reaction to the outputs from the political system, and they are signals of threats and opportunities to the political system.

The connection between public opinion and political communication is better appreciated under what has come to be known as discursive or deliberative democracy. This version of democracy attempts to enthrone direct participation in a representative democracy. It allows the citizens to directly participate in decision-making with their representatives, with each side reeling out reason(s) why a given policy option would be adopted. As a matter of fact, “both are expected  to  justify  the  laws  they  would  impose  on  one  another.  In  (such) a democracy, leaders should therefore give reasons for their decisions, and  respond  to  the  reasons  that  citizens  give  in  return,” (Princeton University, n.d, p. 3). This concurrent participation in policy formulation makes for ownership and acceptance of policy outcomes. Deliberative democracy differs from traditional democratic theory in that authentic deliberation, not mere voting, is the primary source of legitimacy for the law. 

Public opinion’s pride of place in the survival of the political system has been the reason why political communications have never ceased to influence it using political structures, media representations, and media agenda-setting for the public interactions. The maze of relationships between the politics, the media and the citizens are described with the three dimensions of structures, representation, and interaction.

The structural dimension has to do with the formal institutional features.  Most obviously, this includes media organizations, their political  economy,  ownership,  control,  regulation,  and  issues  of  their  financing,  as  well as  the  legal  frameworks  defining  the  freedoms  of—and  constraints  on—communication…. The  representational  dimension  refers  to  the  output  of  the  media,  the  mass  media  as well  as  “minimedia”  that  target  specific  small  groups  via,  for  example,  newsletters  or campaign  promotion  materials…. Interaction actually consists of two aspects.  First, it has to  do  with  the  citizens’ encounters  with  the  media—the  communicative  processes  of  making  sense,  interpreting, and  using  the  output.  The second  aspect  of  interaction  is  that  between  citizens  themselves,  which  can  include  anything  from  two-person  conversations  to  large  meetings (Dahlgren 2005, pp. 148 – 149).

The trades of political communication in structural dimension exist between politics and media, in which politics controls information access and dissemination towards an end. In this category, classic  democratic  issues such as freedom  of  speech,  access,  and  the  dynamic  of  inclusion/exclusion caught attention. The dimensions of media representations and citizens’ interactions feature the trades of political communication between the media and the citizenry, in which the extent and content of political communication allowed by politics reaches the citizenry for interactions, and eventual formation of opinion, the public opinion. The reaction of the citizens could go back to politics directly, but in the whole, the media remain the mediator.


These dimensions of political communication however feature the classic trades of political communication which extant literature believe to have been destabilized, although not destroyed following the advent of the Internet.  Blumler  and  Gurevitch  (2000)  summarized  the  ways  that  the traditional  systems  of  political  communication  in  Western  democracies  are  being  destabilized  by  changes  in  late  modern . They  took  up  a  number  of  themes including the massive  growth  in  media  outlets  and  channels,  along  with  changes  in  the formats  of  media  output,  the  blurring  and  hybridization  of  genres,  and  the  erosion  of  the  distinction  between  journalism  and  non-journalism. This development largely removed the power of control of access and dissemination of information from the politics especially as the Internet is a platform not just for one to one interaction but also doubles as a platform for mass communication.


Conclusions
Public opinion is a form of political communication, and also a product of the same political communication. Public opinion and political communication represent the systemic interactions between the political system and its environment. While political communication is not the exclusive thing of the political system, public opinion belongs to the environment, and it is a value which the political system hunts to catch with its feedback mechanisms, if not for its functionality, for its survival. This explains why structural and representational dimensions of political communication often target public opinion towards political ends. The development of the Internet has however removed most of the powers which the political system wields on public opinion through the control of information access and dissemination. The  explosion  of  media  platforms  with  which  actors can get their message out, including the twenty-four-hour cable news  channels,  all-news  radio,  online  news  websites,  and social media, has created a seemingly limitless marketplace to the citizenry for shopping information.





References
Blumler, J. G., & Gurevitch, M. (2000). Rethinking the study of political communication. In J. Curran & M. Gurevitch (Eds.), Mass media and society (3rd ed., pp. 155–172). London: Arnold

Dahlgren, P. (2005) The Internet, Public Spheres, and Political Communication: Dispersion and Deliberation, Political Communication, 22:2, 147-162, DOI: 10.1080/10584600590933160

Deering, M. (n.d). What is Public Opinion? - Definition & Examples. Accessed from https://study.com/academy/lesson/what-is-public-opinion-definition-examples.html


Easton, D. (1953). The Political System: An Inquiry into the State of Political Science. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Easton, D. (1965). A Framework for Political Analysis. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc.

Giemza, K. (2014). Characteristics of Political Communication in Social Networks. Mixed Methods Research on the Example of Warsaw MEPS. Accessed online from http://cejsh.icm.edu.pl/cejsh/element/bwmeta1.element.desklight-eadaf410-15ef-46a3-90e4-36a3e1104323/c/Giemza-K.-Characteristics-of-Political-Communication-in-Social-Networks.-Mixed-Methods-Research-on.pdf.


Macreadie, R. (2011). Public Opinion Polls. Accessed online from    DOI: 10.13140/2.1.2546.4646

Nnoli, O. (1986). Introduction to Politics. Longman Nigeria Ltd.


Princeton University (n.d). What Deliberative Democracy Means. Acessed online from http://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/s7869.pdf

Small, T.A., Giasson, T., Marland, A. (2014). The Triangulation of Canadian  Political Communication. In Small, Giasson, Marland (eds). Political Communication in Canada: Meet the Press and Tweet the Rest. Vancouva, Toronto: UBC Press


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