How to follow and analyze public opinion: Invention and circulation of an authority figure

Details

Serval ID
serval:BIB_A5257843F184
Type
A part of a book
Publication sub-type
Chapter: chapter ou part
Collection
Publications
Institution
Title
How to follow and analyze public opinion: Invention and circulation of an authority figure
Title of the book
Methodological and Ontological Principles of Observation and Analysis: Following and Analyzing Things and Beings in Our Everyday World
Author(s)
Kaufmann Laurence
Publisher
Routledge
Publication state
Published
Issued date
2018
Peer-reviewed
Oui
Editor
Cooren François, Malbois Fabienne
Chapter
3
Pages
74-111
Language
english
Abstract
Like Nation or God, Public Opinion is a conceptual being or a sociosemiotic object which orients political processes and configures public debates even though it is, from a strict ontological standpoint, an intangible and deferential “entity”. To understand how public opinion has thus become the ultimate authority figure in modern democracies, we have to resort to a method that is archeological in nature. It consists of following the circulation, transformation and “ontologization” of public opinion from its emergence in the Republic of Letters to its recognition as a supreme instance of government during the French Revolution of 1789 and then to its more contemporary factualization as the output of polling methods and survey apparatus. Although the figure of public opinion is now endowed with relative sociosemiotic stability, it still encapsulates the semantic and political tensions between social multiplicity and political unity, freedom and constraint, contract and obedience, common opinion and general interest, that characterize it from its emergence. The saliency of these different tensions depends upon the order of worth and organizational configuration that define the social spaces and arenas that public opinion goes through. Nowadays, the rise of populism tends to reduce public opinion to the expression of a preexisting identity, generally ethnic or national, that the leader would incarnate “in person”, violating thereby the ventriloquial relationship of representation that characterizes democracy. However, this populist reduction may well be temporary. Indeed, the semiotic materiality of a concept such as public opinion might be robust enough to combat its degradation and reactualize the normative ideal that still remains one of its constitutive features.
Keywords
deference, public opinion, authority figure, populism, political representation
Create date
22/10/2018 9:38
Last modification date
31/01/2020 6:19
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