Abstract

Prevailing in the survey industry is the conception that public sentiment is a simple arithmetic function of individuals’ sentiments, many of them held only privately, maybe even secretly. Against this conception, the present paper argues that public sentiment is better construed as strategic deductions from publicly available evidence—a matter of the public working out a common sentiment from publicly available information. This conception diverges dramatically from a conception of public sentiment as the weight of private thoughts or beliefs—items that may be measured by a poll, at least when the appropriate survey methodologies are correctly administered and analyzed. The reason to prefer a conception emphasizing public materials is perhaps obvious: only that which enjoys public visibility has a chance of effecting change. If measuring public sentiment is truly in service of taking stock of forces at work on the social-political stage, that is quite sufficient—as the arguments presented here will show—to prefer the approach on offer here over those currently prevailing.