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Giving Voice to Ordinary Citizens: Public Opinion Research as Intermediary Between People and Politics

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The Interplay of Civic Engagement and Institutionalised Politics

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Third Sector Research ((PSTSR))

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Abstract

Representative polls have been advocated as neutral, scientifically legitimised instruments to translate citizens’ concerns, needs and wishes into public priorities and political options; but they have also been criticised as tools for politicians to manipulate the population. This chapter looks at these intermediary roles of polls and of more qualitative and interactive public opinion research and how this research has become intertwined with democratic innovations. The consultation practices of the European Union demonstrate the risks of these developments. However, from a civic engagement perspective, checking the representativeness claims of political actors and facilitating public deliberation are still relevant intermediary roles for public opinion research. They might be hard to achieve, but it is worth trying for a more responsive polity and a more reflexive civil society.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Also called survey research, a term sometimes used to distinguish serious academic investigations from polling as the ‘quick and dirty’ polls for commercial market research or to follow party preferences and forecast election outcomes. Following Schuman (2008), I ignore these distinctions and use polls and polling as equivalents of survey research.

  2. 2.

    There is a parallel here with equality assumptions in deliberative democracy. See Habermas’ (2022, p. 69 ff) response to criticism of his ‘ideale Sprechsituation’.

  3. 3.

    Known in the literature as ‘Schweigespirale’ (‘spiral of silence’; people conceal a supposed minority position, making the majority larger) and ‘bandwagon’ (already discussed by Gallup in the 1930s: people want to be on the winning side of the largest party or the preference of the majority).

  4. 4.

    Solutions are sought by offering payments and other incentives, oversampling hard-to-reach groups, weighting respondents differently, but they have their drawbacks and are applicable only when underrepresentation is related to easily identifiable demographic characteristics.

  5. 5.

    Apart from general distortions of (small) group interaction such as homogenisation (decreasing variety), polarisation (moving to the nearest extreme) and domination (moving to the preferences of advantaged participants). See Luskin et al. (2022), who do not find these to be significant effects in their large database of deliberative poll mini-publics.

  6. 6.

    Sometimes written with a © because it is a patented concept by Stanford. It was developed in the early 1990s by James Fishkin and Robert Luskin.

  7. 7.

    See for an overview of datasets and reports: https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/screen/home. It offers some possibilities to create tables and graphs. Gesis, the German national data archive, offers the datasets, questionnaires and other documentation for further analyses: https://www.gesis.org/en/eurobarometer-data-service/home

  8. 8.

    An important issue is the decreasing response rate, possibly going hand in hand with an increasing pro-EU response bias (cf. De Vries & Hoffmann, 2020).

  9. 9.

    Similar to the Internet consultation the European Commission used to conclude in 2018 that European citizens no longer wanted the clocks to change between summer and winter time. ‘Millions of Europeans used our public consultation to make their voices heard. The message is very clear: 84% of them do not want the clocks to change anymore. We will now act accordingly and prepare a legislative proposal to the European Parliament and the Council, who will then decide together,’ said Commissioner Bulc in the EC press release of 31 Augustus 2018. In this case, two-thirds of the participants were from Germany, probably stimulated to participate by the media.

  10. 10.

    EPC projects itself as ‘an independent, not-for-profit think tank dedicated to fostering European integration through analysis and debate’ (Stratulat & Butcher, 2018, p. 6). The organisation sets itself up as the authoritative voice of European civil society and as responsible for the orderly organisation of ‘ECCs’ (European Citizens’ Consultations).

  11. 11.

    What the EU institutions do with the report is not very clear, though the European Commission does provide an overview of what had been done by mid-2023 (https://commission.europa.eu/system/files/2023-06/COFE_FS_2023_en_0.pdf), and the Council of the EU is also still working on it (2023): ‘Work on the follow-up within the Council is ongoing! Stay tuned!’ (https://www.consilium.europa.eu/media/64865/20231346_pdf_qc0423277enn_002.pdf).

  12. 12.

    See also Special Eurobarometers 500 and 517 surveying the readiness to get involved. One of the options for engaging: ‘By taking part in European cultural and sports events linked to the Conference on the Future of Europe’.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands

    Paul Dekker

  2. Department of Sociology, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands

    Paul Dekker

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  1. Paul Dekker
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  1. Heidelberg University, Centre for Social Investment and Innovation (CSI), Research Centre at the Max Weber-Institute of Sociology (CSI), Heidelberg, Germany

    Adalbert Evers

  2. Center for Civil Society Research, Marie Cederschiöld University College, Stockholm, Sweden

    Johan von Essen

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Dekker, P. (2024). Giving Voice to Ordinary Citizens: Public Opinion Research as Intermediary Between People and Politics. In: Evers, A., von Essen, J. (eds) The Interplay of Civic Engagement and Institutionalised Politics. Palgrave Studies in Third Sector Research. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-54231-2_9

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