Self-Referential Bubbles and the Role of Complaint: Some Reflections on Opinion Polling and Social Contracts in the Anthropocene

This paper investigates the role of opinion polling in contemporary democracies. Opinion polling, the paper argues, demarcates a shift from representative democracy to responsive democracy. Following Bernard Manin’s Principles of Representative Government (1997), in the imaginary of representative democracy, politicians promise and implement, the people judge this implementation. People and their representatives are connected through a time lag between policymaking and judgement. In responsive democracy, it seems, the relationship between politicians and the population is fundamentally reconfigured. Rather than being connected through the representative time-lag, politicians and the population form two self-referential systems – two bubbles – that are connected mutual affectedness. The paper focuses on how opinion-polling and complaint constitute central mechanisms in forming both self-referentiality and affectedness. First, the paper draws out how opinion polling produces several feedback loops. One such feedback loop is the way changes in polled opinion is information relayed in and through media (media mediating itself), a second loop concerns the way media reporting on opinion polls influences voter preferences, and a third one refers to how opinion poll (media) reporting influences policymakers’ preferences. Secondly, the paper highlights how this residual connection is fragile and fleeting – it is a simulation - and as such must continuously be cared for. Here the role of complaint is important. The paper follows up on a remark by Jean Baudrillard (2008 [1983]) that the essence of democracy is, in fact, the possibility and the desire to complain. In contemporary democracy, people are asked to complain, enjoy and also value complaining. In this sense, the complaint is key to contemporary social contracts. What is less secure, is the complaint’s status and directionality as a connecting element between the policy bubble and the citizen bubble. To maintain the connection, complaint must be constructed as residual judgement, i.e. framed so that behind the complaint sits a demand for change directed at the politicians. Complaining, however, tends turn inward and not follow an external objective beyond itself. The paper argues that opinion polling then becomes the extractive mechanism of the complaint turned self-referential to continuously create the connection between the system of policymaking and the system of citizens.