Democracy without the People?

"Unless mass views have some place in the shaping of policy, all the talk about democracy is nonsense" - V.O. Key said that in 1961 in his book Public Opinion and American Democracy. It reminded me of the discussion that Sina, Taeku, and I have had on this blog with regard to John Kingdon's Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies. When reading this eminent work, I had been surprised how little influence the media and public opinion were supposed to have on policy making. According to Kingdon, the will of the public had considerably smaller effects on policy than the President, Capitol Hill, and lobbyists in the U.S. of the 1970s, putting policy making somewhat closer to nonsense than it should be.

I was wondering whether things have changed since the 1970s and turned to "Public Opinion," an excellent resource published in 2004 and authored by leading public opinion scholars Carroll Glynn, Susan Herbst, Garrett O'Keefe, Robert Shapiro, and Mark Lindeman. They cite convincing evidence that "although the public does not always rule, it is often able to move - or maintain - government policies in desired directions." First of all, the authors assert that the media have considerable influence on public opinion. Changing media formats and technologies have shaped how we see the political world and how we respond to it. The small extend of media influence on policy making that Kingdon found may have grown quite a bit over the recent decades, culminating, for now, in this quote from Tony Blair's 2007 speech on Public Life: "I am going to say something that few people in public life will say, but most know is absolutely true: a vast aspect of our jobs today ... is coping with the media, its sheer scale, weight and constant hyperactivity."

And then there's public opinion. Glynn and her colleagues show that policy making has largely been attuned to shifts in the public's overall ideology. When citizens have strong convictions about an issue that is much debated, policy makers follow this opinion in most instances. Suprisingly, this effect has been visible since the Kennedy administration in the early 1960s, when opinion polling became an institutionalized part of political decision making in the U.S. Granted, there have always been instances when politicians disregarded the will of the public, manipulated it, or used it to figure out how to most effectively sell their favorite policy. But more often than not politicians follow the lead of the public - after all, they do want to be re-elected.

So it's not nonsense, all the talk about democracy, and all the talk on this blog. It's possible that the influence of the media and public opinion on policy making has grown since Kingdon's original analysis. It's also possible that policy makers have become more aware of this influence. We need a replication of Kingdon's analysis of the 1970s to figure out what part the will of the public plays in policy making today, and in relation to other, possibly less democratic, forces.

Photo Credit: Flickr User Glynnis Ritchie