[Dissertation] The Voice on Paper: A Dialogic Critique of Public Opinion Polling

292 Pages·2011·3.556 MB·English

by  Son Ho Kim

THE VOICE ON PAPER: A DIALOGIC CRITIQUE OF PUBLIC OPINION POLLING
Son Ho Kim
A DISSERTATION
in
Communication
Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania
in
Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the
Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
2011

Supervisor of Dissertation

______________________________
Michael X. Delli Carpini, Professor of Communication and Walter H. Annenberg Dean

Graduate Group Chairperson

______________________________
Katherine Sender, Associate Professor of Communication

Dissertation Committee
Klaus Krippendorff, Gregory Bateson Professor of Communication
Barbie Zelizer, Raymond Williams Professor of Communication
Dedicated to my beloved wife and children:
Ju Hyun, Jung Min and Jason

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

‘To say the things he truly feels and not the words of one who kneels’ sings Frank
Sinatra in My Way. While writing this dissertation, I listened to the song repeatedly, and,
indeed, have done my best to say the things I truly feel and I feel true. It was Professor
Klaus Krippendorff who inspired me to make a dialogic turn en route to my dissertation.
He taught me the wisdom of social construction and ethics of dialogue -a genuinely
communicative weltanschauung- in his office, at his dining table and even on a hospital
bed. His voice, to borrow St. Paul’s vocabulary, ‘dwells richly’ in what I penned here. An
expedition through ‘my way’ is always precarious. There are unforeseeable quagmires
and insurmountable barriers. But I was so fortunate to be with Dean Michael X. Delli-
Carpini. He, as a renowned pollster, welcomed chairing my dissertation which criticizes
public opinion polling, and spared no efforts to clear all other obstacles to help me march
on. He also showed me what democratic leadership should be like. Professor Barbie
Zelizer led me to ‘take journalism seriously.’ I appreciate her motherly hugs. I express
special thanks to Professor Patrick Murray (Monmouth University) for allowing me
access to the rare and sensitive data, without which Chapter 3 would have been unfruitful.
The Annenberg School is a splendid place that houses many masterly scholars:
Professor Elihu Katz has always been a source of penetrating insights since my first year
at Annenberg. I learned from him how to think about the media and mass society
affirmatively without losing a critical stance. Professors Joseph Cappella and Vincent
Price, together with whom I had engaged in the E-Dialogue project and under whose
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guidance I wrote my master’s thesis, taught that a sound quantitative analysis is all about
rigorous reasoning, not fancy techniques. Professor Oscar Gandy Jr., a harbor for the
students with minority backgrounds, made me realize the importance of institutional
approaches and public policies. Professor Robert Hornik is my role-model for recipient-
designed teaching. I am grateful to Professors John D. Peters (University of Iowa) and
Daniel Dayan (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) for their thought-provoking
teachings, when they were at Annenberg as visiting scholars. Their lessons are an integral
part of my dissertation. Two projects with Professor Nathaniel Persily (then at Penn’s
Law School) and Dr. Annice Kim (Wharton School) gave me opportunities to understand
issues in American politics in greater depth. I must thank to Annenberg staff members --
Joanne Murray, Bev Henry, and Lizz Cooper – for their kind and wonderful support.
Lastly, I am immensely indebted to the Philip Jaisohn Memorial Foundation for
providing my family with the privilege of residing in a pacific environment. Living in the
house of Dr. Jaisohn (1864-1951) – ‘America’s finest gift to Korea,’ we were able to
experience and learn a lot about the ways of American life, not to mention, the heroic life
of a giant.
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ABSTRACT

THE VOICE ON PAPER:
A DIALOGIC CRITIQUE OF PUBLIC OPINION POLLING

Son-Ho Kim
Michael X. Delli-Carpini, Klaus Krippendorff

Public opinion is an elusive communicative phenomenon. The American people
believe that their voice uttered in conversation constitutes public opinion, whereas they
must read newspapers, especially poll reports, to know the current of public opinion.
Moreover, although public opinion polling is widely received as the most unbiased
measure of public opinion, the language reported by polling is quite different from the
ordinary people’s utterance.
The dissociation of social reality from the commonsense understanding mainly
stems from the fact that public opinion exists, inasmuch as poll questions are asked. To
understand the roles played by poll questions, we need to open the black box inaccessible
to most people –namely, the ways in which questions and responses are exchanged in
survey interviews, the political contexts in which poll questions are determined, and the
linguistic frames with which poll questions are reported as public opinion.
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First, a conversation analysis of survey interviews shows that (1) survey
interviews are an institutionally constrained ventriloquist talk in which participants have
little responsibility for their speech, (2) the communicative relationship between
interviewers and respondents is asymmetric, and (3) respondents, feeling obliged to offer
an answer, tend to provide improvised answers. Second, a content analysis of poll
questions demonstrates that (4) questions dealing with moral issues (i.e., same-sex
relationships and abortion) are packed with election-frames, and that (5) those election-
framed questions have little to do with exerting civil power in the political process. Third,
an analysis of grammatical frames in reporting the poll results shows that (6) public
opinion has become a matter of news moving away from the editorial pages, and that (7)
in that process, public opinion has lost the illocutionary force normatively attributed to it.
In short, public opinion polling has monologized public opinion, which rebuts the
democratic hope that opinion polling helps ‘citizen as respondent’ participate in politics.
However, these critiques do not lend support to a careless conclusion that opinion
polling is invariably bad for democracy. Rather, in order to serve democracy better,
opinion polling needs to be reconfigured as a public event in which people can participate
by authoring the polling event.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTER 2
PUBLIC OPINION AS A DIALOGIC CONCEPT 9

2.1. Conceptual Problems of Public Opinion (9)
2.2. Critical Debates on Public Opinion (14)
2.3. Dialogic Perspective: Public opinion as
Coordination with the Third Person (23)

CHAPTER 3
THE SURVEY INTERVIEW: A VENTRILOQUIST TALK 53

3.1. The Survey Interviews as a Communication Genre (53)
3.2. Method: Conversation Analysis (62)
3.3. Prescripted Talk (65)
3.4. Improvisation of Answers in Survey Interviews (90)
3.5. Discussion (101)

CHAPTER 4
ELECTION FRAMES IN POLL QUESTIONS:
THE CASES OF SAME-SEX & ABORTION ISSUES 106

4.1. The Semantic Content of Public Opinion (106)
4.2. Election and Public Opinion Polling (108)
4.3. Method: Content Analysis of Poll Questions (121)
4.4. Poll Questions about Same-Sex Marriage (126)
4.5. Poll Questions about Abortion (140)
4.6. Discussion (154)

CHAPTER 5
PUBLIC OPINION AS NEWS:
NEW YORK TIMES, 1896-2005 159

5.1. Problems of Reported Speech (159)
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5.2. Historical Relationship between Public Opinion
and Media (163)
5.3. Method: Analysis of Grammatical Frames (174)
5.4. Changing Conceptions of Public Opinion: An Overview (183)
5.5. Rhetorical Uses of ‘Public Opinion’ (196)
5.6. Poll Reporting: Information about Public Opinion (215)
5.7. Discussion (238)

CHAPTER 6
CONCLUSION: STAGING PUBLIC OPINION 243

6.1. Summary (243)
6.2. Remodeling Opinion Polling More Dialogically (249)

Appendix 261
Bibliography 269

LIST OF TABLES

Table 2.1. Three Perspectives on Public Opinion (22)
Table 4.1. Number of Poll Questions about Abortion (140)
Table 4.2. Poll Questions about Supreme Court Decisions (146)
Table 4.3. Election-Framed Poll Questions about Abortion (149)
Table 5.1. References of ‘Public Opinion’ (198)
Table 5.2. Distributions of ‘Public Opinion’ (202)
Table 5.3. Placement of ‘Public Opinion’ (203)
Table 5.4. Four Semantic Roles of ‘Public Opinion’ (207)
Table 5.5. Roles of ‘Public Opinion’ by References (210)
Table 5.6. Metaphors of ‘Public Opinion’ (213)
Table 5.7. Referents in Headlines (219)
Table 5.8. Quotation Styles of Opinion Polling (222)
Table 5.9. Semantic Roles in Poll Reports (226)
Table 5.10. Reporting Styles of Opinion Polling (234)
Table 5.11. Metaphors in Poll Reports (237)

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 3.1 Participant Observation (59)
Figure 3.2 Survey Interviews (60)
Figure 4.1 Poll Questions about Same-Sex Relationships, 1973-2005 (127)
Figure 4.2 Distributions of Polling Issues about Same-Sex Relationships (137)
Figure 4.3 Distributions of Polling Issues about Same-Sex Relationships,
Election Year vs. Non-election Year (138) 
Figure 4.4 Distributions of Polling Issues about Same-Sex Relationships,
Media vs. Non-Media (139)
Figure 4.5 Poll Questions about Abortion, 1962-2005 (141)
Figure 4.6 Distributions of Polling Issues about Abortion (151)
Figure 4.7 Distributions of Polling Issues about Abortion,
Election Year vs. Non-election Year (152)
Figure 4.8 Distributions of Polling Issues about Abortion,
Media vs. Non-Media (153)
Figure 5.1 Articles Mentioning ‘Public Opinion’ and ‘Poll’
(New York Times, 1896-2005) (187)
Figure 5.2 ‘Public Opinion’ and ‘Poll’ in the Headline
(New York Times, 1896-2005) (189)
Figure 5.3 ‘Public Opinion’ and ‘Poll’ on the Front Page
(New York Times, 1896-2005) (194)
Figure 5.4 ‘Public Opinion’ and ‘Poll’ in Editorials
(New York Times, 1896-2005) (195)
Figure 5.5 Comparison of Semantic Roles and Functions (233)

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CHAPTER 1
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INTRODUCTION

American citizens are accustomed to saying and hearing that the democratic
government should listen to public opinion and that its political decisions must take into
account what the American people think, feel, want or argue. Every day they read
newspaper articles about public opinion, especially the numbered report of scientific
opinion polls, proclaiming that American public opinion favors or opposes, or has shifted
for or against public officials on a slew of political issues such as the financial crisis,
healthcare reform, gay marriage, the death penalty, gun control, abortion, the war in Iraq
and so on. One can easily discover that one’s personal opinion is consonant or discordant
with public opinion. One might also express rants and raves as to how politicians act
upon public opinion. Indeed, American citizens have sound common sense
understandings of public opinion and are familiar with these experiences.
Nonetheless, there is an important contradiction of which most Americans are
scarcely aware: whereas all Americans speak their opinions in ordinary conversation
with other people, public opinion is heard from somewhere else, from an immediately
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