Public Opinion

It is the aggregate result of individual opinions on public matter. It is a social judgment reached upon a question of general importance after conscious and rational public discussion.
Public opinion is an aggregate of the individual views, attitudes, and beliefs about a particular topic, expressed by a significant proportion of a community. Some scholars treat the aggregate as a synthesis of the views of all or a certain segment of society; others regard it as a collection of many differing or opposing views. Writing in 1918, the American sociologist Charles Horton Cooley emphasized public opinion as a process of interaction and mutual influence rather than a state of broad agreement. The American political scientist V.O. Key defined public opinion in 1961 as “opinions held by private persons which governments find it prudent to heed.”

Factors influencing public opinion
1. Environmental factors
Most pervasive is the influence of the social environment: family, friends, neighborhood, and place of work, church, or school.

2. The mass media
Newspapers, radio, television, and the Internet—including e-mail and blogs—are usually less influential than the social environment, but they are still significant, especially in affirming attitudes and opinions that are already established. The news media focus the public's attention on certain personalities and issues, leading many people to form opinions about them. Government officials accordingly have noted that communications to them from the public tend to “follow the headlines.”

3. Interest groups
Interest groups, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), religious groups, and labour unions (trade unions) cultivate the formation and spread of public opinion on issues of concern to their constituencies. These groups may be concerned with political, economic, or ideological issues, and most work through the mass media as well as by word of mouth. Some of the larger or more affluent interest groups around the world make use of advertising and public relations. One increasingly popular tactic is the informal poll or straw vote. In this approach, groups ask their members and supporters to “vote”—usually by phone or via the Internet—in unsystematic “polls” of public opinion that are not carried out with proper sampling procedures.

4. Opinion leaders
Opinion leaders play a major role in defining popular issues and in influencing individual opinions regarding them. Political leaders in particular can turn a relatively unknown problem into a national issue if they decide to call attention to it in the media. One of the ways in which opinion leaders rally opinion and smooth out differences among those who are in basic agreement on a subject is by inventing symbols or coining slogans: in the words of U.S. Pres. Woodrow Wilson, the Allies in World War I were fighting “a war to end all wars,” while aiming “to make the world safe for democracy”; post-World War II relations with the Soviet Union were summed up in the term “Cold War,” first used by U.S. presidential adviser Bernard Baruch in 1947. Once enunciated symbols and slogans are frequently kept alive and communicated to large audiences by the mass media and may become the cornerstone of public opinion on any given issue.

5. Public opinion polling
Polling can occasionally reveal whether the people holding an opinion can be thought of as constituting a cohesive group.

6. World opinion
The increasing importance of global telecommunication, trade, and transportation have contributed to interest in a new concept of world public opinion, or “world opinion.” The idea began to receive serious academic consideration near the end of the 20th century, as scholars noticed certain global homogeneities in views and attitudes as well as in tastes and consumer behaviour. __________________
Ahmad Shakeel Babar
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