Politial Communication, Vblume 10, pp. 101-120 Printed In the UK. All rights reserved.

1058-4609/93 $10.00 + .00 Copyright 1993 Taylor & Francis

Constructing Publics and Their Opinions

W. LANCE BENNETT University of Washington It is generally agreed that public opinion and popular sovereignty are the foundations of liberal democracy. In a perfect worid, enlightened citizens would hold dialogues with their representatives about how to advance the values and priorities that constitute the electoral mandate. In these dialogues, members of constituencies and their elected representatives would share the information required for rational choice and enlightened policymaking. When information and social conditions change, underlying group structures, ideological codes, and opinion formations would also change in clear and predictable ways. The resulting opinion shifts would be intelligible to rulers and scholars alike, because in this perfect world, the citizen groups competing for power in government could be located on a belief-value continuum along which issues and policy preferences line up with some ideological if not mathematical precision, in such a state of harmony, politicians would be able to read public opinion as if it were a familiar text. The interesting puzzle surrounding this idealized story or myth about opinion and democracy is not so much how little it resembles available reality in most societies, particularly the United States, but how much it continues to provide the interpretive backdrop for theory and research on public opinion, particularly in the United States. Because few societies come close to the ideal, and the United States falls shorter than most of its industrial democratic peers, the ironic result is that textbooks end up telling students of opinion more about what empirically discovered opinion formations are not than what they are made of. The litany of received wisdom about opinion is that it tends to be unstable, unconstrained, uninformed, and not ideological. One begins to suspect that generation after generation of scholars have contemplated the choice between a pleasing mythology and an unruly reality and adopted the mythology (of sovereign publics witli stable bodies of opinion) as a lens for examining the real world, even though that lens does not bring much into focus. Perhaps adopting other analytical assumptions would require disrupting the idealized definitions of democratic politics that form the core paradigms of many subfields of political science and related social science disciplines. In any event, what we have mainly learned is how little actual publics conform to their idealized roles. The easy conclusion time and time again is that people are poorly informed, unsystematic in their thinking, and not inclined to join in stable coalitions with large numbers of others to advance broad ideological agendas. A companion assumption often found with this way of thinking is that elites and relatively small attentive publics are 707

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responsible for what coherence there is in public debate and policy thinking. Also characteristic of mythological thinking, this elitist assumption persists without much corroborating evidence and groyving bodies of data to the contrary. Alongside the portrait of an unsophisticated public, there is an important counterstory of a public that makes the best sense it can out of a world that is at best selectively represented by elites who do not display much more perfection in their opinions than the masses. This academic countermyth of a rational publica public that is doing the best it can given the choices and the kinds of ieaders available to itplaces the burden of democratic shortcomings on the same elites who represent the strength of democracy in the story of the unworthy public. In the rational public story, more charitable measures of opinion reveal glimmerings of coherent thinking, and the residual of ignorance and instability that remains is attributed to leaders whose dissembling rhetoric lowers the level of public discourse. The irony of these mirror-opposite research traditions is that science has reproduced the leading brands of populist and elitist political common sense in society. Given the opposing nature of the narratives and the impressive marshaling of academic supporters on both sides, the ultimate question of truth is reduced to which academic faction holds sway in the influential graduate training programs and on the editorial boards of leading journals; For most of the past half century, the debate has been dominated by adherents of the "unsophisticated public" school of thought. Whether this dominance is due to superior evidence or to more strategic placement of the academic gatekeepers is best left to the eye of the beholder. The more basic problem, however, is that most debates in opinion research dissolve quickly into myth and ideology or into equally irreconcilable questions of methodology and measurement. Whether conducted on an ideological or methodological plane, debates about the nature of public opinion have become irreconcilable because, among other reasons, the concept of opinion itself has become something of an academic fetish. A fetish is a symbol (in this case, the symbols "public" and "opinion") abstracted out of messy, ambiguous political settings or contexts and studied in isolation, imbued with importance and meaning within academically constructed contexts. Like sexual and economic fetishes built around idealized erotic articles or money, the public opinion fetishes of both the populist and elitist varieties are sustained precisely by their removal from real political contexts and by their continuing reference to idealized understandings. This results in arcane disputes that are often settled unilaterally by discounting the other side's empirical evidence that does not fit the idealized facts. The result, not surprisingly, is a field in considerable disarray, fraught with theoretical and methodological problems, and unable to shed much light on the basic question of how public opinion does operate politically in everyday American politics. Following a brief review of some of the major paradoxes of mainstream opinion research, we turn to an alternative way of thinking about opinion and its political dynamics: a symbolic constructionist approach inspired by the work of Murray Edelman. In this approach, we see a way around the contradictory populist and elitist paradigms in which opinion becomes an abstracted political fetish. The price we pay for this liberation from idealized publics and

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their elusive opinions may be too steep for those committed to a rational, objective social science epistemology; the recognition that opinion is not the end product of a neatly generalizable rational process. To the contrary, for Edelman, opinion in its political context is a symbolic construct that may appear more or less informed, rational, ideological, or otherwise constrained depending on the interplay of power and communication motivated by competing political strategies. This alternative way of understanding opinion is guided by Edelman's (1992) admonition about public opinion and other formalized political entities: Tbe political entities tbat are most influential upon public consciousness and action, then, are fetishes: creations of observers that then dominate and mystify their creators. I try here to analyze the pervasive consequences of the fetishism at the core of politics, never a wholly successful enterprise because it is tempting to exorcise a fetish by constructing a rational theory of politics, (p. 11) The next section examines some of the paradoxes and impasses of opinion research that Edelman's perspective anticipates. After that, we review some of the promising directions that flow from Edelman's approach and look at the advantages of studying opinion as a symbolic construct situated in always shifting political contexts. The concluding section illustrates applications of constructionist perspectives with reference to the work of other scholars who have demonstrated useful empirical applications of Edelman's assumptions. Some Paradoxes of Traditional Opinion Research

The search for a stable organizing structure underlying public opinion has produced over 30 different measures of what might loosely be called political sophistication, none of which has proved empirically reliable, much less the basis for a general theory (Neuman, 1986, p. 192). At every turn, generalizable, predictive models of underlying opinion structure have eluded researchers, yet the response has been to generate new measures or simply make the best of bad ones. No topic better illustrates the futile quest for the Holy Grail of opinion than the search for underlying ideological structure. If some sort of liberalconservative ideology prevailed in American political culture, so the reasoning goes, people should be able to recognize its logic and produce opinions tbat reflected this deeper structure. Never mind the fact that many students of American political culture firmly reject tbe possibility of stable ideological polarization in what they see as a fluid liberal culture (e.g., Connolly, 1987; Hartz, 1953; Kammen, 1980; Rodgers, 1987), tbe search for an idealized public goes on. For those who hold that idealized public to high standards of ideological sophistication, barely 10% of respondents can draw distinctions between liberalism and conservatism that satisfy researchers, and the unsurprising conclusion is that the general pubic displays little underlying ideological sophistication (Converse, 1964). For those more inclined toward the rational public ideal, there is a tendency to invent ideology tests that are easier to pass, making the

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measurement and manufacture of ideology something of a cottage industry among behaviorally oriented political scientists. As Neuman (1986) observed: An important and puzzling question about the linkage between sophistication and opinion involves the issue of ideology, or whether and to what extent sophistication leads to conservative or liberal opinions. The term political ideology is to students of mass political behavior what the red flag is to the bull. At the mere mention of the term scholars flare their nostrils and furrow their brows, ready to do intellectual battle. There is as much controversy and soul-searching about the origins and adherence of political ideology in mass publics among researchers as there is about politics among committed ideologues, (p. 73) True to this characterization, those committed to showing that the public is incapable of sophisticated thinking continue to find low levels of ideological constraint operating behind opinions, whereas, in the words of Haltom and Ziegler, other scholars operationalize the concept so loosely "that few sapient life forms could fail to exhibit ideology" (Haltom & Ziegler, 1992, p. 12). As a case in point, they cite Russell Dalton, who recommends using a selfclassification scheme that, in Dalton's own words, "merely requires that voters can locate themselves on a Left/Right scale, without having to articulate the meaning of the scale. By this standard, the vast majority of Western publics can be described as ideological" (Dalton, 1988, p. 25). All of this leads Haltom and Ziegler to a proposal reminiscent of Edelman's earlier idea about fetishes: Perhaps the search for the deep structure of opinion reflects less the demonstrable empirical or analytical success of any given approach than the varying attempts of analysts to reconstitute the political world in their own images. Referring to the numerous but seldom reconciled uses of the liberal-conservative continuum, Haltom and Ziegler (1992) say that what appear to be vices when the continuum is regarded as a system for classification are seen to be virtues when the continuum is reconceived as a means for constructing political reality to suit the end and interests of those who use the continuum. Critics of the liberal-conservative continuum marvel that it survives despite its serious flaws. We argue that the liberal-conservative continuum is a standard tool of analysis because its "flaws" advance its functions, (p. 2) What these observers mean by conceptual and methodological flaws advancing the uses of ideological concepts is simply that analysts are given considerable interpretive license by the very imprecision of their concepts and by the empirical disputes swirling around them. Those inclined by common sense to see the public as ideological can always find reason to continue to do so, whereas those inclined by common sense to see the public as unsophisticated have other reasons to advance their claims. All the while, pundits, pollsters, news commentators, and textbook writers advance the uses of ideological pub-

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lies to impose familiar, if illusory, patterns on otherwise ambiguous and elusive realities. Among other things, say Haltom and Ziegler (1992), ideological blocs . . . ease analysis and fulfill myths in civics textbooks. Elections are considerably more edifying, for example, if interpreters construct groups of voters whose allegiance to a candidate, party, or policy can be explained by a calculus that strikes academics and journalists as rational or at least fathomable. Most interpreters prefer the democratic process to seem ideological rather than stochastic. For all these reasons, the assumption of at least minimal ideological sophistication is functional and understandable, if not empirically defensible, (p. 11) In other words, measuring opinion against idealized standards of order and coherence allows observers to have the world the way they want it, sometimes filled with rational people making intelligible electoral choices or supporting a responsible leader or point of view and sometimes filled with a rabble incapable of reason or responsible judgment. The fluidity and contradictions of basic opinion concepts and measures make it possible for different observers (or the same observer at different times) to interpret publics both ways. As Edelman (1977, pp. 49-51) has noted, claims about public opinion are themselves political constructions, and those constructions take on greater rhetorical appeal when supported by theoretical jargon and scientific evidence, even if those concepts and facts are essentially contested behind the walls of academe. Thus, it becomes possible for experts to dismiss some opinion formations as the expressions of ignorant and unconstrained publics while legitimizing other opinion poll findings as credible expressions of knowing individuals. During the 1980s, for example, opinion polls consistently opposing government interventions in Central America were often discredited by pollsters and academic experts called on by the press. Meanwhile, polls taken among the same population at the same time on subjects like abortion were routinely passed along in news reports as legitimate expressions of opinion. Never mind that abortion policy raised questions of life and death that had bedeviled theology, medical science, and the Supreme Court; the public was often cited as a credible source in news about abortion. By contrast, the arguable presence of stable underlying beliefs respecting the sovereignty of other nations was not enough to warrant frequent or unqualified use of polls on Central America policy in news accounts (Bennett, 1989). The point here is not that abortion opinion should have been more heavily discounted or Central America opinion more easily credited, but that two bodies of opinion from the same general population about the leading issues of the day were represented in dramatically different ways by politicians, academic experts, and journalists. As for how those different news accounts were constructed, that is another story (Bennett, 1990). The point here is that those constructions clearly used the full range of academic disagreement resulting from failed attempts to discover general patterns in public sophistication. To the extent that representations of opinion appeal to prevailing yet contradictory common sense about the underlying sophistication or lack of sophistication in the general public, those political constructions appear all the

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more acceptable and natural. Even many of the readers of this article may find it reasonable to "count" opinion about abortion and "discount" opinion about foreign policy. The prevalence of similar dispositions in news audiences makes corresponding representations of public opinion in the daily news equally sensible, creating a sort of confirming backdrop of reality (based on available common sense) that joins experts and the people they analyze in a network of well-known, if often debated, assumptions. Because the news makes it a virtue to tell two sides of every story, people (whether they be news audiences or academic experts) are invited to project their preferred images of publics and politics onto mediated episodes from the passing stream of reality. At the same time, people outside those webs of common sense may feel politically estranged from the same public debates in the media. Whether many people are engaged meaningfully by representations of publics and their opinions or whether many are estranged from those representations, the point remains that claims about public opinion are no less politically constructed or any more objectively true. The conceptual ambiguity created by continuing attempts to find a general theory of public opinion runs through debates over ideology, information levels, and dozens of other measures aimed at finding stable patterns of opinion. A more exhaustive list of the paradoxes resulting from decades of efforts to build opinion theory is contained in Neuman (1986), but one additional example can be offered here to illustrate why the idealization of publics and their opinions is of little help in understanding the pragmatics of opinion formation and change. Consider an important implication of the unsophisticated public story. The focus of so much attention on an unsophisticated and unstable general public would seem to imply that elites, opinion leaders, or some core of more informed citizens display the kind of opinion formations recommended for democratic governance. Indeed, if nobody conforms to the idealized model of opinion sophistication, it becomes hard to avoid asking what recommends that model to us. However, one of the most troublesome paradoxes cited by Neuman and other observers is that the very standards of political sophistication that are lost on mass publics also generally fail to explain much about elite opinion. This raises the tricky question of what human population, if any, those theories could possibly explain. However, as Neuman argues, neither the opinions of general publics nor elites measure up conceptually to the standards of this school: The lack of a meaningful link between political sophistication and opinion holding could be a fluke of some sort, an artifact of the interview process, or the product of a shared sense of civic mindedness in American political culture. The correlation between sophistication and the stability of expressed opinions over time is a more critical test of the knowledge-opinion link. It is well known that there is a great deal of noise in the measurement process (Converse, 1964; Key, 1961; Schuman and Presser, 1981). It becomes increasingly evident to those who have pored over the results of surveys, especially panel surveys, that public opinion consists of some important trends of opinion against a background of constant churn. Perhaps

Constructing Publics atid Tbeir Opinions this churn is an inherent and natural "Brownian movement" of opinion and belief. The key to the model of stratified pluralism [which contends that at least elites are sophisticated] is then to find the link between sophistication and opinion stability in that potential elite of opinion leadership which provides continuity and consistency and, in times of change, exists as the bellweather stratum. But in this case there is even less evidence of the link. Indeed, there is significant variation. Although the opinions of some respondents are much more consistent over time than others, the opinions of the more sophisticated of the citizenry are not significantly more stable. (Neuman, 1986, p. 61)

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Research by John Zailer has further compromised the assumption that where higher levels of information exist, greater sophistication, stability, and independence of mind will also be found. On a variety of issues, Zailer has demonstrated that more informed members of opinion samples tend to be more responsive to cuing from political elites because those elites are represented in the media. It appears that, far from creating more sophistication and independence of mind, higher levels of information lead to greater receptivity to elite propaganda (Zailer, 1991). These and other paradoxes of opinion theory all point to the difficulty of generalizing about publics as though they existed somehow suspended in time and space, independent of the mass communications processes that act on them and through which they react on a continuous basis. However, many of the paradoxes of public opinion disappear quickly if we alloyv for the possibility that opinion formations change dramatically with the varying symbolic contexts in which publics are constructed and their opinions are defined. Problems of poll results that change with the question wording on surveys dissolve when we recognize that there are no standardized or neutral symbolic formats for presenting policy options to publics in the real world. Instead, the rhetoric selected by leaders to mobilize supporters or deflate opponents is aimed at creating shifting opinion responses. To cite another example, the puzzle of more informed citizens being more susceptible to politicians' messages makes sense in a holistic context in which background information about an issue is hard to separate from (and, indeed, may be synonymous with) what elites are saying about that issue in the news. Hence, informed citizens are, almost by practical necessity, defined by their receptivity to elite cues. In the final analysis, the question of whether publics hold legitimate or credible opinions on a given issue is hardly an academic matter at all, but an important political question in situations in which academic views become part of the political context in which opinion is constructed. These and other shifts in perspective follow from Murray Edelman's thinking about public opinion.

Edelman's Approach to Opinion Analysis The core of Murray Edelman's thinking, as developed over the corpus of work cited below, is that leaders construct publics by publicizing symbols and Ian-

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guage categories that evoke emotional capacities and commonsense understandings available to individuals, setting up a willingness to accept solutions that follow logically or emotionally from the symbolic framing of problems. Even when the symbolic categories of understanding offered by leaders do not convince or move people, they remove or displace other ways of thinking from public debate, distracting public attention from alternative courses of political action. In this process of constructing publics around symbolic definitions of situations, some people may be aroused by images of problems and reassured by promised solutions, whereas others are simply dumbfounded or quiescent in response to debates that offer them little symbolic grip on reality and equally little voice for their real concerns. Because the symbolic cues and the corresponding compositions of public enemies, public citizens, and bystanders can change dramatically from situation to situation, it is not surprising that measured opinion characteristics, even in studies of the same issues, often change greatly over time. For Edelman, the characteristics most commonly expressed in opinions by way of information, intensity of emotional arousal, linkages to other issues, left-right ideological statements, or stable references to past opinions (i.e., all the characteristics that conventional opinion research typically tries to measure) are better understood as responses to cues embedded within the symbolic composition of the political situation itself. Although Edelman's constructionist perspective resolves some of the major paradoxes of contemporary opinion theory, many students of opinion may prefer to live with paradox rather than think about their subject matter as a symbolic construction. I suspect that what is objectionable to many academics about Edelman's approach is that it will not yield lawlike generalizations or general theoretical propositions either about opinion or about its causal role in democratic politics. Of course, traditional approaches have not yielded many reliable generalizations or propositions either. However, like many of the political actors and political problems that Edelman writes about, it may be easier for science to live with paradox and failed solutions than abandon the popular myths (confirmed by common sense in society) that guide scientific thought and practice, particularly in the social sciences in which claims to scientific standing may be based as much on rhetoric as results. What has kept Edelman out of the mainstream of opinion research, then, is probably not the political overtone of his work, for he displays little favoritism for either the myth of the rational public or the myth of the unsophisticated public. Rather, the trouble caused by Edelman's approach is much deeper, operating primarily at the epistemological level in which proponents of competing scientific paradigms and mythologies are likely to suspend their differences and join ranks against him. In place of positivist assumptions about an objective reality in which stable variables interact in measurable ways to produce predictable results, Edelman sees a world of much greater ambiguity in which outcomes vary according to the interplay of political symbols on differently situated individuals. Although the idea that opinion is inherently contested and ambiguous may help explain the conflicting results and conceptual ambiguity in much of the academic literature, the simultaneous rejection of an objective, predictive, positivist epistemology probably represents something akin to religious heresy for many scholars. Those academics may prefer to cling to the epistemological underpinnings of objective science (even at the

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sacrifice of theoretical headway) rather than adopt Edelman's social constructionist epistemology that incorporates the factual claims of a science of opinion as just so much more symbolic data to be interpreted. The people in Edelman's world have divided loyalties and they occupy different social realities. Most individuals struggle with internal belief conflicts, making the measurement of stable beliefs and dispositions beside the point, not to mention an unlikely result. In this world, groups do not exist fully formed, ready to enter situations from the wings when cued by leaders. Rather, they are constituted and reconstituted through the symbols used by leaders to draw attention to problems, enemies, and other objects of immediate and often fleeting social interest. In short, opinion is constructed situationally rather than arriving predisposed on the political scene. This does not mean that each situation begins as a blank slate or that individuals experience some sort of social amnesia from one situation to the next. Leaders can cultivate stable following over time, and individuals can seek out confirming and comforting understandings of new situations. Tbe main departure from conventional thinking is that Edelman assumes that political socialization seldom involves selecting a well-ordered set of values and beliefs from the larger political culture. Rather, he suggests that most people learn a broad selection of values and beliefs from their cultures, contradictions and all. These values and beliefs enter into opinions in more or less organized or ideologically coherent ways, depending on how they are cued by leaders across situations. In cases in wbicb different authorities capture individual attention or new symbols trigger different psychological associations, individuals can draw on their large repertoires of often conflicting cultural premises to make sense out of the shifting political situations in which they find themselves. For most people, being stable, informed, ideological, or otherwise consistently opinionated is far from the paramount concern. Moreover, because the meaning of the moment comes to people in part from values, beliefs, and feelings within themselves, people can claim to be true to their own understandings about politics. The very things that positivists regard as variables and facts, Edelman sees as symbolic elements in conflicts over tbe construction of meanings. This perspective turns the whole enterprise of science inside out. For Edelman, traditional scientific claims about properties of public opinion are not hypotheses that describe some independently existing world but are political statements that are actively part of the political construction of opinion itself. Opinion as a standing entity, a predictable outcome, or a causal process does not exist except as a symbol that is essentially contested by the various actors communicating about a particular issue at a particular time. In the following statements, Edelman (1977) defines his approach to analyzing public opinion, emphasizing its differences with both prevailing science and common sense on the subject: Any reference to "public opinion" calls to mind popular beliefs that influence public officials and inhibit politicians who try to oppose it. But there are conflicting opinions whenever there is an issue, by definition, and opinions shift with the social situation in which people find themselves, the information they get, and the level of ab-

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straction at which the issue is discussed. There can be no one "public opinion" but, rather, many publics. Some opinions change easily, while others persist indefinitely, (p. 49) As a result of this shifting, situated nature of opinion, attempts to build theory by looking for stable individual predispositions or beliefs only add another layer of conceptual confusion without getting any closer to some reliable basis from which future opinions can be predicted. Polls and research results interpreted as expressions of underlying belief structure are better understood as symbols rather than as "facts" about a stable public that have been conveniently if somewhat miraculously suspended in time and space: To define beliefs as public opinion itself is a way of creating opinion In short, "public opinion" is a symbol whether or not it is a fact. It is often nonexistent, even respecting important questions. Most of the population can have no opinion regarding thousands of technical, economic, professional, military, and other decisions. Pressure groups and government officials can usually cite public opinion as a reason for taking or avoiding action with confidence that they will not be proven wrong. If they define the public will at a high enough level of generality, they cannot be wrong. (Edelman, 1977, pp. 49-50) None of this offers much encouragement for thinking that opinion polls somehow discover latent political dispositions among a socially coherent public. Instead, Edelman puts a constructionist spin on what teams of methodologists have long regarded as serious and perhaps fatal measurement problems with the scientific study of opinion: Opinion polls help create the opinions they count when they incorporate evocative terms in their questions, as is inevitable if the questions deal with controversial matters. (Edelman, 1977, p. 50) By "evocative terms," Edelman means that the symbols used in poll questions have similar capacities to evoke opinions as the symbols used in actual political situations. This makes it difficult to imagine any scientific, much less neutral way to write survey questions aimed at eliciting some fundamental or baseline opinion that exists independently of what people think in the presence of more "loaded" political symbols. For Edelman, thinking cannot be disconnected from symbols, and all symbols are loaded one way or another. Further complicating the construction of opinions through polls is that officials routinely use multireferential, emotional (condensation) symbols to discuss issues during the times when polls are taken. As Edelman suggests below, this symbolic priming of the polls reflects the artfulness of politicians whose public stock in trade is the vocabulary of symbols they use to mobilize popular reactions. Increasingly in recent years, this poll-priming has become less art and more science, guided by the test-marketing of strategic symbolism through private political polling operations. In either case, the introduction of symbolic cues into the polling environment makes the opinion "discovered"

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by polls hard to separate from the political forces acting on it, just as it is difficult to separate popular preferences for advertising slogans from the marketing research that "discovers" them (Ginsberg, 1986). This circularity or context-dependence of the opinion measured in polls also recommends contextual analysis over the often inconclusive efforts to sort out causal connections between poll data and policy outcomes. Instead, Edelman (1977) sees opinion and policy as inseparable constructs within the same process: Statements about "public opinion" help marshall support for particular policies. The term connotes a force independent of government, but a large part of it echoes the beliefs authorities deliberately or unconsciously engender by appealing to fears or hopes that are always prevalent, (p. 50) Putting these elements of opinion together, Edelman offers a constructionist definition of opinion. In this definition, both the mythology and the science of independent-thinking, stable democratic publics become part of the political contexts in which opinion is constructed: "Public opinion," then, is an evocative concept through which authorities and pressure groups categorize beliefs in a way that marshalls support and opposition to their interests.... Public opinion is not an independent entity, though the assumption that opinions spring autonomously into people's minds legitimizes the actions of all who can spread their own definitions of problematic events to a wider public. (Edelman, 1977, p. 51) As noted earlier, accepting this definition requires overcoming epistemological resistance rooted in the belief that the world "out there" is constituted by stable, rule-governed realities. In the case of pubjic opinion, this positivist epistemology relies heavily on an interpretive framework that leads to a search for stable individual political predispositions suitable for scaling as predictive variables. Some studies find evidence of such stable political thinking, and the majority do not. Either way, most researchers look for evidence of such an ordered reality in which individuals belong to identifiable social or ideological groups that form the basis of a priori publics. Rejecting these notions, Edelman encourages us to stop holding the world accountable to such unlikely organizing principles and to adopt, instead, a more relaxed set of interpretive assumptions: (1) Individuals move in and out of publics from separate or "multiple" social realities, 1a. meaning that people with similar "opinions" about the same object may not share the same background understandings, resulting in publics and opinion formations that change constantly as the definition of a situation evolves, and new symbols are introduced. lb. meaning that publics do not arise on their own, but are con-

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structed by leaders and other authorities whose rhetoric encourages people to imagine themselves and their experiences as linked. (2) Individuals typically hold contradictory beliefs that are sustained by emotionally fluid mythological thinking about politics, 2a. meaning that an individual has the capacity to react differently to similar opinion objects, depending on how they are symbolized. 2b. meaning that there is no standard, neutral, or objective way to represent opinion objects, either in polls or in the real world. (3) It follows from the above propositions that the objects of opinion, the composition of publics, and their expressed opinions cannot be discussed independently of the symbolic construction of a given opinion situation. Even when people express themselves in a particular way in a particular situation (e.g., by responding to polls or refusing to respond to polls, by voting or not voting, by rioting, or by declaring their withdrawal from politics altogether) those expressions are, in turn, interpreted by politicians, journalists, and academic experts, making opinion as much the product of secondary analysis, commentary, and media spin as it is some independently existing entity. All of this makes the ultimate constitution of public opinion fluid, subject to multiple interpretations, and something different than the mere sum of individual preferences. The advantages of considering Edelman's epistemological assumptions are numerous. To begin with, there are the empirical gains of explaining the levels of individual instability and the puzzling shifts in aggregate opinion that are routinely found in research. These troublesome "problems" of opinion instability can be explained as the natural products of socialization processes in which people learn contradictory mythologies and ways of thinking about society, enabling individuals to express different opinions under different symbolic conditions. Edelman's perspective also reconciles opinion analysis with a long tradition of research in social psychology showing that opinions are flexible ways for individuals to negotiate meanings and memberships in complex symbolic environments. For individuals defining their social roles, opinions become tentative and easily adjusted symbolic bonds establishing group membership and status, identity, and a variety of instrumental goals, including just making sense of one's own behavior and that of others (Bem, 1965; Newcomb, 1943; Newcomb, Koenig, Flackes, & Warwick, 1967). The long list of studies showing little attitude-behavior consistency suggests that from the standpoint of individuals trying to make sense of and act meaningfully within complex society, consistency is of relatively little importance compared to other coping strategies. When situational conditions change, so do individual opinion strategies aimed at adaptation, and those changes do not appear to affect the individual's sense of internal consistency or coherence. To the contrary, stress and anxiety are more likely to accompany efforts to remain attitudinally consistent in the face of changing symbolic cues (Lane, 1973; Newcomb, 1943). Edelman's approach also offers methodological guidelines that enable us to move beyond the seemingly irreconcilable controversies about survey question wording and measurement problems. These rarefied methodological dis-

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putes can be turned outward and reconciled as natural variations in responses to different symbolic conditions. In place of the search for strict scientific methods (which routinely break down under the weight of arcane interpretive disputes), Edelman offers what might be termed analytical guidelines. Appropriate to an interpretive methodology, these guidelines point to general patterns of symbolic usage, not to lawlike relations among variables or latent bodies of opinion waiting to be expressed at a drop of the right question or measurement scale. Methods of Contextual Opinion Analysis Although critics often charge that Edelman's approach and symbolic analysis in general lack a rigorous methodology, this criticism also reflects epistemological differences of opinion about what constitutes a methodology. Working from the traditions of language analysis and symbolic philosophy, Edelman's work is rich with methodological perspectives that evolve and become more sophisticated over time. In his early works, for example, the reader will find basic semiotic material on the interpretation of symbols within contexts and on the relation between language and thought (Edelman, 1964). Later work provides important information about the structure of mythology, the socialization of individuals in rich and contradictory belief environments, and the important recognition that political action is not simply a dependent variable as defined by the behavioral paradigm but becomes itself an often ambiguous symbol that is subject to political interpretation (Edelman, 1971). Next we are invited to see the ways in which language codes establish power relations and how the multiple realities to which people belong may keep the inequalities of power from being recognized as problems at all. To the contrary, language terms fit so differently in social realities that the significance of the same welfare, social work, or therapy situation may mean quite opposing things to people on different ends of the power relationship (Edelman, 1977). What is degrading or crazy-making for one actor may be understood by a vocabulary of healing, therapy, and help by another. Finally, to this broad set of guidelines for symbolic analysis, Edelman introduces the idea of complex public dramas, showing how isolated academic categories like leadership, elections, and opinion are better understood as parts of larger dramatic spectacles in which publics are constructed symbolically and the majority of citizens look on as spectators (Edelman, 1988). Deconstructing the spectacle offers a look at the ways in which publics are written in and out of the scripts of politics and how seldom those scripts provide transparent understandings of power. Whether Edelman deconstructs the intimate relationship between therapist and client or the media spectacle of leaders trying to mobilize the support of distant followers, he keeps the analytical focus on the constitution of power in society. Because the creation and maintenance of power is at the core of politics, the political uses of ideology and opinion on the surface are necessarily contradictory and shifting, shoring up power relations that require continual rationalization, distraction, and deception. If there is a consistent ideology operating in political life, then, it is the silent language of power, inequality, and

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status that constitutes for Edelman the dominant ideology of politics. It can only be measured by the underlying material conditions and the often unexpressed emotions with which people live. As for the things that leaders say and the opinions people form, these symbolic gestures change as often as the underlying relations of power are challenged or changed. Over this progression of work, many concepts introduced early on are deepened with each new analysis. For example, the idea of language categorization is a key to Edelman's understanding of how power is constituted and reconstituted and thus occupies an important role in his evolving analytical method. Among the things he looks for in a political situation are how political issues, objects, or groups become categorized; what political actions flow from those categories; and what actions are not taken because equally plausible categories of understanding were not evoked in the situation: We are seldom aware how easily and frequently our beliefs about causes and consequences are created and changed by subtle or unconscious cues. Quite to the contrary: we ordinarily assume that we live in a world in which the causes and consequences of actions are stable and fairly well known. Neither the media nor academic studies pay much attention to the fundamental political work that makes the benefits and the deprivations [imposed on people by government decisions] politically possible: the continuous creation and remolding of the public beliefs about the causes of particular outcomes, thereby justifying some actions and building opposition to others. . . . The character, causes, and consequences of any phenomenon become radically different as changes are made in what is prominently displayed, what is repressed, and especially how observations are classified. Far from being stable, the social world is therefore a chameleon, or, to suggest a better metaphor, a kaleidoscope of potential realities, any of which can be readily evoked by altering the ways in which observations are framed and categorized. Because alternative categorizations win support for specific beliefs and policies, classification schemes are central to maneuver and political persuasion. (Edelman, 1992, p. 1) In recent years, Edelman has developed the idea of "category mistakes," in which rhetorical categories justify policies that not only fail to solve problems on their own terms but actively sustain the power relationships and inequalities that perpetuate and sometimes worsen the problems in question. Thus, people "mistakenly" continue to think in political categories that perpetuate the very problems they seek to solve. At the same time, of course, there is no mistake about choosing language categories that protect the power and advantage of the groups who dominate public discourse. The mass media become powerful agents for publicizing these mistakes by featuring the words of the public officials who claim to represent the vast majority of the people. Indeed, the most fundamental category mistake in a democracy may be the claim of leaders to represent the views of the people, when, in fact, dwindling numbers of people participate in politics, endorse the

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views of leaders, or otherwise feel represented by the language used to describe them and their life conditions. Even when political language appeals to some groups in the system, it may prove divisive to society and democracy by making enemies of large numbers of others. As an example, Edelman refers to the fear of crime and the popular language of law and order as a common and socially destructive category mistake: "The fashionable belief, repeatedly revitalized by the rhetoric of public officials and candidates for elective office is that crime springs from evil people who thrive upon muggings, robberies, drug abuse and murders" (Edelman, 1992, p. 5). Among the policies that have flowed from this categorization was the doubling of the U.S. prison population during the 1980s without any appreciable effect on the underlying crime problem. At the same time, the official embrace of and the media attention to this categorization drove other, possibly more productive ways of thinking about crime out of the marketplace of ideas. As is typical of these mistakes, however, the rhetoric of crime played unmistakenly to the silent language of power and inequality in society while minimizing the differences and, therefore, the electoral risks among candidates running for office. As Edelman sums it up: A category mistake plays a decisive role in converting the land of the free into the home of the jailed. At the same time it helps office holders win reelection and helps conservatives defeat social programs. The facile evocation of inherently criminal types conceals the link between an economic and social system that denies large numbers of people the means to support themselves and their families and their resort to illegal action. To break the law is in part a way of surviving and in part a form of social protest, usually the only effective way for people who lack money and status to express their anger at a social and political system that keeps them poor and dependent. (Edelman, 1992, p. 5) A similar category mistake came into play surrounding the 1992 riots in Los Angeles triggered by the jury acquittal of the White police officers who beat Black motorist Rodney King during a traffic arrest. News-making politicians walked a tight rhetorical line by evoking sympathy and concern for the neglect of race relations and urban problems while categorizing the rioting and looting as lawless behaviors that were anything but legitimate political acts. In effect, this categorization discouraged thinking about riots as public opinion and encouraged thinking about them as the criminal acts of individuals who had run out of control motivated by mob psychology. The common official denial that the riots were expressions of public opinion illustrates the degree to which the opinion process is largely a process of defining or categorizing people, events, and actions. Of course, many of the riot participants interviewed in news stories were quick to categorize the riots as political acts and clear expressions of opinion with statements like these: "Discrimination against black people has been going on for a long time. People are upset."

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"I don't even eat this stuff [referring to looted food in the trunk of a car]. I'm going to give it away to people who don't have any food." "Look, I just want some of this free food. I'm hungry. Like a lot of people around here, I don't have nothing. So today I do." "All of this is a statement of unity. This is about the black community coming together." (Marriott, 1992, p. All) Newspaper reiaders and television viewers were presented with the alternative of identifying with these statement of unknown individuals or with the statements of officials who categorized those individuals as lawbreakers who were anything but members of publics to be listened to on their own terms. The media offered subtle cues supporting official categorizations like this headline about random violence that ran over the story containing the above quotes: FIRE AND ANGUISH RAGE AS RANDOM VIOLENCE SPREADS ACROSS LOS ANGELES. There were, undoubtedly, many news watchers who understood the riots as expressions of legitimate public opinion and not as opportunistic individuals committing random crimes on a large scale. However, many of those who drew their own political conclusions also probably understood their reading of the news as a political activity, in itself, because of its oppositional character requiring the rejection of official categories. Moreover, those who supplied their own interpretive categories for political events risked placing themselves outside the bounds of official, legitimate debate and authoritative interpretation. In effect, they joined company with the rioters whose opinions had been discounted and marginalized within the media context. It is easy to see why the public opinion that is measured in polls as well as the range of views typically heard in "polite society" follow the categorical paths offered by leaders and by those respectable opponents with party or interest group credentials. To begin with, being informed and being realistic about a situation are practically synonymous with orienting one's opinions to the official categories emerging in the mass media debate. At a deeper psychological level, it is also much easier to accept those dominant categories (or simply remain silent or quiescent) because to do otherwise places individuals in the vulnerable position of having to defend opinions against established views that require no defense because they appear to be so widely accepted (Noelle-Neumann, 1984). By contrast, those who join the mainstream of opinion in a situation not only have the strength of numbers and authorities to cite in support of their views, but they can evoke the slippery logic of common sense to maintain the appearance of consistency in their thinking. Indeed, it probably seemed entirely consistent for people to think of the Los Angeles uprising simultaneously as an understandable response to social injustice and, at the same time, as an unacceptable criminal activity that disqualified it as a legitimate expression of opinion. Based on the routine coexistence of opinions like these, Edelman (1992) concludes that the very idea of opinion consistency is, itself, a category mistake: Misleading beliefs about what causes what are all the more powerful in politics because we typically see our opinions and those of other

Constructing Publics and Their Opinions people as consistent, firmly based in moral commitments and an unchanging ego. We do not easily recognize how volatile, easy, and deceptive the process of constructing opinion really is. The assumption that opinions are stable is itself a category mistake, of course, displacing the site of opinions regarding political issues from the social to the individual. If opinions were indeed rooted in each individual person's "character" or reason, they would consistently reflect that person's moral qualities and capacity for logic. But opinions always involve social role taking, social influences, and social pressures, making them both volatile and readily rationalized as they change. Categorization is fundamental to their creation and recreation and to their rationalization as well. (Edelman, 1992, p. 10)

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We come full circle here, from epistemological assumptions about the construction of publics to methodological and analytical guidelines about how those publics and their opinions are constructed. Both the composition of publics and the content of opinions are at issue empirically in a constructionist approach. Whether publics are perceived as collections of individuals with attitudes or as groups responding to common material conditions is an issue that cannot be resolved by the academic study of opinion for a simple reason: These and other conceptions of publics are contested in the real world with important consequences for the outcomes of public debates about social problems and solutions. This perspective is difficult for those inclined toward positivist epistemologies to accept and even to understand, as reflected by this query from one of the anonymous reviewers of this article: "Maybe not resolved, but perhaps clarified by academic study? Is there no role for academic study here?" Of course there is a role for academic study but not in clarifying conceptions of publics that are constructed in the first place and have proved resistant to confirmation or refutation precisely because their support is more mythological and common sensical than empirical. Academic study is useful in understanding how publics in the world are constructed symbolically, contested politically, and debated academically. The constructionist approach to opinion invites us to settle for no single academic definition of publics or opinion content. To the contrary, we should take nothing for granted about the composition of publics or the content of their opinions. Instead of adopting an academic definition oif publics and opinions as end states in some idealized political process, the point of contextual analysis is to understand how competing categorizations of opinion are used in the process of constructing and legitimizing political actions and policies. Above all, the point of this sort of analysis is not to promote one category of understanding over another but to demonstrate how different political consequences flow from the opinion that emerges around different categories: policies that succeed or fail and social relations or racial tensions that subside or prevail. In the end, we are encouraged to see how the construction of publics and their opinions become a code for the constitution and reconstitution of power, gender, race, and the forms of inequality that affect both the quality of life and the sense of belonging in society.

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Epilogue: Inventing a New Tradition for Opinion Research

The possibilities for understanding opinion and democracy in these ways are rich. Indeed, Edelman is not the first to point out the importance of symbolism and the social construction of political realities. His perspective connects with a broad set of intellectual traditions that include semiotics, linguistics, sociology, criticism, and political science. Among the thinkers he draws into his web are Lev Vygotsky, George Herbert Mead, Alfred Schutz, Harold Lasswell, Jacques Derrida, Edward Sapir, Benjamin Whorf, and Walter Lippmann, among others. What recommends his perspective is not just its intellectual breadth but the way in which it addresses anomalies within the existing opinion paradigms. It is just possible that a perspective anchored in the grand empirical traditions of sociology, psychology, politics, and linguistics offers more fruitful conceptual and analytical tools than the current behavioral paradigms inspired by democratic mythology and committed by research design to the uneasy equation of polls and public opinion. In recent years there have been signs of discontent among many opinion scholars with the limits of explanatory frameworks, with the narrowness of intrusive methods, and perhaps above all, with the anemic sense of politics contained in much of the survey-based research tradition. A number of recent works suggest an openness to new approaches to opinion analysis, approaches that are compatible with Edelman's work and, more generally, with a constructionist perspective. Among the best examples of what may be an emerging new tradition is Ginsberg's (1986) analysis of how polls have become equated with opinion politically, with the result that other forms of opinion expression have become marginalized and individuals have become political captives of atomized imaginary publics created by the polling process itself. Along similar lines is Herbst's (1993) historical look at the evolution of polls, emphasizing the loss of a social conversation among recognizable groups and its replacement by a scientific abstraction that has little to do with a public at all. Various applications of contextual analysis showing how opinion is constructed in different political situations can be found in work by Bennett (1989, 1990), Entman (1989, 1992), Hershey (1989, 1992), and Sapiro (1992). Another collection of studies by established opinion scholars (Margolis & Mauser, 1989) approaches the possibility that opinion is as likely to be a dependent variable as an independent variable in policy processes and elections. All of these promising developments suggest that scholars are moving in the direction of constructing a new tradition for opinion analysis. Perhaps the most promising development of all is that this tradition gains a critical empirical edge by placing itself at odds with political mythology and prevailing social common sense and the academic theories that flow from them. At the same time, a constructionist approach is open to a variety of methods and data so long as they are not driven by positivist epistemologies. Survey data, content analysis, and semiotics all sit comfortably together in the works cited above. The difference, of course, is that the epistemological assumptions about publics, opinions, and the constitution of social situations have been changed to permit a lively discussion about what public opinion is rather than continuing to debate what it is not.

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Persistence and change: Bennington college and its students after 25 years. New York: Wiley. Noelle-Neuman, Elisabeth (1984). The spiral of silence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rodger, Daniel T. (1987). Contested truths: Keywords in American politics since independence. New York: Basic Books. Sapiro, Virginia (1992, September). The political uses of symbolic women. Paper presented at tbe Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago. Schuman, Howard, & Presser, Stanley (1981). Questions and answers in attitude surveys: Experiments on question form, wording, and context. San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Zailer, John (1991, September). Political awareness and susceptibility to elite influence on foreigr) policy issues. Paper presented at the Social Science Research Council workshop on the Media and Foreign policy held at the tJniversity of Washington.