Silent Politics: Polls and the Awareness of Public Opinion

280 Pages·1972·37.758 MB·English

by  Leo Bogart

polls and the awareness
of pnhlie opuiion
“...a long, skeptical look at the polls, their uses
and misuses....”—The New York Times
SILENT POLITICS
Polls and the Awareness of Public
Opinion
By Leo Bogart
How well can polls measure public
opinion?
Should government policies follow
majority opinion?
Do polls influence elections?
Can there be polls under a dictator-
ship?
Public opinion polls are today them-
selves an important factor in politics
rather than merely an account of polit-
ical trends. A penetrating commentary
on this development, Silent Politics:
Polls and the Awareness of Public Opin-
ion, is the first book to look upon polls
and the awareness of poll results as
forces that influence public opinion.
Since the emergence of polling in the
last third of a century, public opinion
has found a new and powerful voice,
but in Silent Politics Dr. Bogart argues
that predictions based on polls can be
misleading since they reflect a transient
stage in a public opinion that constantly
and often rapidly changes.
• Opinion polls are most visible in a
presidential election year. The au-
thor explains the difficulties of mak-
ing sound forecasts, and describes
the increasingly widespread use of
polls to manipulate the selection of
candidates and to sell them to the
voters.
• Polls are used more and more, Bogart
points out, both by public officials
who wish to justify their policies and
by pressure groups seeking to per-
suade those officials to change their
positions and their priorities. The au-
thor attacks the thesis that leaders
should follow majority sentiments
measured by surveys, and distin-
guishes between poll results and the
opinions formed in open discussion
and debate on a complex issue such
as the Vietnam War.
•Opinions are subject to change, the
book argues, because they reflect
the different roles people assume in
(Continued on back flap)
/
Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2017 with funding from
China-America Digital Academic Library (CADAL)
https://archive.org/details/silentpoliticspoOOboga
I
I
X
.4-
}
3
i
9
I
SILENT POLITICS;
POLLS AND THE AWARENESS OF PUBLIC OPINION
■'A
I
(
X
(
1
.i
4
I
SILENT POLITICS:
POLLS AND THE AWARENESS OF PUBLIC OPINION
LEO BOGART
Wiley-Interscience, a Division of John ^Vhley 8: Sons, Inc.
New York • London • Sydney • Loronto
HM
Copyright (c) 1972, by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
All rights reserved. Published simultaneously in Canada.
No part of this book may be reproduced by any means, nor
transmitted, nor translated into a machine language with-
out the written permission of the publisher.
Library of Clongress Catalog Card Nund)er: 75-374.SO
ISBN 0-471-08520-0
Printed in the United States of America.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3
IN MEMORIAM
JACOB A. BOGART
1882-1970
•V
I
■fI
I