Although it remains one of the most widely discussed concepts in political analysis (Price, 1992), a case can now be made that our understanding of public opinion is in crisis. At one level, this is a crisis of methodology and prediction. In recent years, pollsters have noted the problem of declining response rates, requiring a greater – and necessarily more speculative – use of weighting to construct a representative sample (Desilver and Keeter, 2015). Possibly related to this, recent years have also seen several high-profile polling failures, including in the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel. In addition, and more importantly, there is a more fundamental, normative crisis of public opinion. Put simply, liberal democracies now face the broader question about how rhetorically and institutionally public opinion is integrated into political decision making, at a time of increased political populism.
One way to address these twin crises of public opinion is to take an historical approach. As Susan Herbst argues in her work (1993), public opinion as commonly understood today is an artefact of the development of the representative sample opinion poll in the 1930s. We have very little systematic, empirical knowledge of how public opinion was used and understood prior to the advent of these methods (Robinson, 1999).
This gap is certainly not because of a lack of evidence. Between the 1830s and 1930s, The Times of London referenced public opinion more than 50,000 times, while The Manchester Guardian archive contains more than 30,000 references. The Hansard record of British parliamentary debate contains 18,247 references over the same period.
Drawing on these resources to construct a large dataset of references to public opinion across a range of British political and media spaces, this study will address several research questions, including:
- How frequently was public opinion discussed in the UK print media prior to the advent of opinion polling and did this change over time?
- Which particular policy issues are linked to public opinion?
- What evidence was used to justify claims about public opinion?
- To what extent was public opinion presented as having a legitimate role in political life? Did it change as democratic reform gathered pace in the nineteenth century?
This undertaking would be useful for contemporary discussion of public opinion. While the past should never be read into the present directly, examining a pre-opinion poll society, and a period where evidence about public opinion was both less systematic and more diffuse, has the potential to challenge the assumptions underpinning much contemporary discussion about public opinion and its role in democratic life.
