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

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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. DelliCarpini. 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 iii

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 recipientdesigned 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 electionframed 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

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CHAPTER 2

PUBLIC OPINION AS A DIALOGIC CONCEPT

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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

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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

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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

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5.1. Problems of Reported Speech (159) vii

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

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

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Bibliography

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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 ______________ 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 1

inaccessible place, and in languages different, if not estranged, from their own tongues. Although every single American citizen may well be presumed to be a member of the American public and may actively engage in conversational exchanges of opinions on a daily basis, the mechanical coupling of political membership and conversational activities does not automatically lend ordinary conversations to be recognized and circulated as “public opinion.” Regarding this problem, John Zaller (1992, p.265) poses an intriguing question.

If the public had an opinion and there was no pollster around to measure it, would public opinion exist? Like the old conundrum about the tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it, this question is not completely vacuous. The answer depends on what one means by public opinion. If by public opinion one means the hopes, fears, feelings, and reactions to events of ordinary citizens as they go about their private lives, then certainly there is public opinion whether or not there is a pollster to measure it. But if by public opinion one means ordinary citizens walking around saying to themselves things like “I strongly approve of the way George Bush is doing his job as president” …… then most of what gets measured as public opinion does not exist except in the presence of a pollster.

In the passage, Zaller distinguishes two different concepts of public opinion depending on the involvement of an observing third party – namely, pollsters. On the one hand, public opinion is conceived as the conversational manifestation of “the hopes, fears, feelings, and reactions to events of ordinary citizens.” Public opinion exists ubiquitously, inasmuch as conversations occur wherever citizens meet and talk. From this commonsensical standpoint, the opinions expressed in ordinary conversation are what the public actually hold, and de jure should be considered as public opinion. On the other

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hand, ordinary conversation does not constitute what Americans de facto experience as “public opinion” in their everyday lives. In order to know the current of public opinion, one should turn the page of a newspaper, press the power button of a television set, or, search the internet, and, then, read poll reports. One can, in no way, hear the voice entitled to be “public opinion” through an ordinary conversation or critical debate with a few individuals, whether they are family members, friends, neighbors or strangers on the street. What engenders such a discrepancy between the two conceptions of public opinion? Why does the commonsense understanding of public opinion not seamlessly converge with the social reality (Searle, 1995) of public opinion? First, one of the chief features of ordinary conversation is that interlocutors, immediately present, engage with each other in terms of the first-second personal relationship. Since a conversation can only occur between concretely embodied two parties referred to as ‘I’ and ‘You,’ there can be no direct conversation between ‘I’ and ‘American people,’ namely, between the first person and the third person. ‘I’ cannot speak to the American public in the same way that ‘I’ address a speech to ‘You.’ Likewise, since the public does not immediately present itself as a conversational interlocutor, public opinion cannot be heard in the same way that ‘I’ hear ‘your’ voice with concrete accents and intonations. Second, ordinary conversation per se is not intended to be publicly communicated, and, normally, no observing third party is present. In other words, except for some special performative cases, people do not engage in a conversational relation for the sake of staging their conversation to other observers or audiences so that their opinions are

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recognized as public opinion. Rather, public opinion requires processes other than what the commonsense theory of public opinion presupposes. That is to say, public opinion exists and becomes a social reality, inasmuch as individual opinions are collected, observed, recorded, summed, and/or reported as public opinion, and these processes necessarily involve the intervention of a third party called ‘pollsters.’ Without these meditational processes, ordinary conversation is merely like “the tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it.” The divergence of the commonsense understanding of public opinion and the social reality of public opinion leads us to challenging problems that traditional theories of public opinion have failed to deal with properly. (1) If we accept that the social reality of public opinion differs from the commonsense understanding of public opinion, then, should we say that the commonsense understanding is a political illusion? In other words, should we discard the democratic notion that citizens participate in the political decision-making process by authoring public opinion? (2) If a statement such as “I strongly approve of the ways George Bush is doing his job as president,” as Zaller says, can exist only in the poll reports, and nobody utters such words in ordinary life, then, what is opinion polling really measuring? Does the thing that opinion polling claims to measure really exist at all in our universe? Why does the statement sound so different from ordinary citizens’ own language?

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(3) What is the nature of the roles played by pollsters, journalists and politicians in making the social reality of public opinion? In particular, what is the nature of the institutional contexts in which ‘public opinion’ is languaged? (4) Is it totally impossible to make the commonsense understanding and the social reality of public opinion converge? If not, under which conditions is it possible?

This dissertation is an effort to critically and empirically examine such problems in regard to opinion polling which has prevailed in most democratic societies when it comes to the conception of public opinion. That is, this dissertation is an attempt to open the ‘black box’ (Latour & Woolgar, 1986) inaccessible to ordinary citizens who mostly have no clue about the nature of the voice of the people represented by opinion polling. The main critical point concerns whether the voice of the people represented by opinion polling can be genuinely said to belong or be attributable to the real people who constitute the public. And, as astute readers may easily infer from the word ‘critical,’ the answer to the question is largely “nay” rather than “aye.” However, to preclude probable misunderstandings and clarify the point of this dissertation, it should be cautioned from the outset that the ultimate goal of this dissertation is not to wage a polemic that opinion polling is a sort to be abolished or deconstructed, and that other sorts (e.g., elections, editorial opinions, petitions, open letters, public rallies, narrative or discourse analysis etc.) can do a better job of representing and communicating public opinion. We must keep in mind, at least, two values that opinion polling has created. On the one hand, opinion polling has a pragmatic

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value as a modern type of ‘political lottery’ (Elster, 1989; Manin, 1997). As pollsters (i.e., Verba, 1996) have constantly underscored, opinion polling gives an equal chance to every citizen to be represented, but the chances are systematically distorted or disproportionately distributed in other sorts of political participation enumerated above (Verba, Schlozman, & Brady, 1995). On the other hand, opinion polling, once published, has a ritual value contributing to a democratic culture in which it is a firmly established norm that lay people can freely speak up their minds and that the government should listen to their voices. Indeed, opinion polling is conducted in a democratic society rather than in an undemocratic regime where restrictions are imposed on publishing opinion polls. Acknowledging these two métiers of opinion polling, this dissertation will demonstrate that those values, nevertheless, are significantly discounted, because the voice represented by opinion polling is not collectively authored by real people at large. In addition, it should be noted that pollsters themselves already know and have sought to resolve some of the issues that this dissertation raises. For example, pollsters have tried to improve the validity of survey answers by removing or minimizing interviewer effects (e.g., Bradburn & Sudman, 1980). But their strenuous efforts have not been so successful, and perhaps have even worsened the problems, because pollsters tend to approach the issues from the observer’s point of view rather than from the communicator’s. In other words, pollsters tend to see opinion polling, by and large, as a ‘survey research’ (Krosnick, 1999) instrument instead of a communicative event. And this erroneous notion has drawn attention away from the ritual-communicative aspects of opinion polling, although the overall procedures of opinion polling – the ways of

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conducting survey interviews, deciding polling issues and reporting the results – retain ritualistic elements which, if well-designed, enable polling to serve better democracy as a public event in which virtually all people, not just a small number of respondents, can participate.

This dissertation consists of two theoretical chapters and three empirical case studies. Specifically, CHAPTER 2 explicates the fundamental problems embedded in the concept of ‘public opinion.’ After reviewing the idiologic, sociologic, and nomologic perspectives on public opinion, Chapter 2 elaborates the dialogic perspective from which public opinion is re-conceptualized as coordination with contemporaries qua the third person plural. In that context, Chapter 2 also describes the historical developments of the three models of public opinion – delegation, mobilization, and observation. CHAPTER 3 tackles the problem of dialogicality in survey interviews. By means of a conversation analysis of actual survey interviews, this chapter examines the problems of dialogicality in two respects. First, Chapter 3 analyzes how survey interviewers and respondents interact with each other, and what institutional constraints operate in the interview process. Second, Chapter 3 also demonstrates the improvised nature of survey answers offered by respondents. CHAPTER 4 investigates the institutional contexts in which poll questions are framed. In particular, Chapter 4 pays attention to the predominance of election frames in poll questions. Through a content analysis of poll questions about two issues – ‘same sex

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marriage’ and ‘abortion,’ -- Chapter 4 shows the political process in which moral issues are packed with election frames in opinion polling. CHAPTER 5 explores how opinion polls are reported in the media. The chapter discusses journalism’s varying institutional linkages with public opinion – namely, delegation, mobilization and observation. Through an analysis of grammatical frames -lexicons, semantic roles, metaphors, and quotation styles – of journalism’s language, Chapter 5 analyzes the ways in which the poll results are reported as news in contrast with the ways in which the phrase ‘public opinion’ was rhetorically used in editorials. CHAPTER 6 summarizes the main arguments and findings that this dissertation seeks to demonstrate and discuss the implications in light of Verba’s thesis that citizens participate in politics as survey respondents. Chapter 6 also suggests that opinion polling be remodeled as a public event in order to function as public opinion in an authentic sense.

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______________ CHAPTER 2 ______________ PUBLIC OPINION AS A DIALOGIC CONCEPT

To have opinions is a universal trait of humanity and to contemplate the opinions of that body sometimes called the ‘public’ is scarcely commonplace. -- J. A. W. Gunn (1989. p.247)

2.1. CONCEPTUAL PROBLEMS OF PUBLIC OPINION The classical theories of democracy consistently have been built upon the metaphors of dialogue. People have rights to ‘talk about’ or ‘discuss’ public matters and to ‘express’ their ‘opinions’ freely. Democracy requires that citizens actively take part in government by making their ‘voices’ ‘heard.’ In democracy, a statesperson does not merely pay attention to strategic advice coming from a political clique, but, must also ‘listen’ to people’s ‘speaking’ of their desires, wants, hopes, beliefs etc. Indeed, democracy is difficult to theorize without recourse to dialogic vocabularies like ‘talk,’ ‘discuss,’ ‘express,’ ‘speak,’ ‘hear,’ ‘voice,’ and ‘opinion’ Thus, the historian of public

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opinion, J. A. W. Gunn (1995) posits that democracy bestowed the crown of ‘queen of the world’ on vox populi. Although public opinion plays such a vital role in commonsense understandings of democracy, ‘public opinion’ still remains as an elusive concept recalcitrant to simple definitions. The elusiveness principally originates from the contradictory connection of the two words -- ‘public’ and ‘opinion.’ As numerous theorists have pointed out, the connection represents a difficult attempt to unite mutually contradictory words, ‘public’ and ‘opinion’: while collectivity and impersonality are implicated in the word ‘public,’ the word ‘opinion’ implies individuality and personal embodiment (Price, 1992; Peters, 1995; Myers, 2004; Splichal, 1999).

 

2.1.1. Opinion    Opinion as a communicative term presupposes the existence of embodied

speaking subjects. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, opinion is a ‘view’ ‘judgment’ or ‘belief’ held about particular issues or a person. Opinion defined as such implies personal ownership, which is linguistically well demonstrated by the fact that opinion can be qualified by possessive pronouns. Consider the following utterance: “In my opinion, it is only your opinion that she told a lie.” In this utterance, the propositional content, ‘she told a lie,’ is a matter of personal opinion whose ownership is attributed to ‘you,’ and the claim, ‘it is only your opinion that she told a lie,’ belongs to another particular person, ‘me.’

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The uncertain and hypothetical nature often associated with ‘opinion’ is derived from this personal identification. As Plato’s famous dichotomy of episteme (rigorous knowledge) and doxa (opinion) shows, opinion is sharply distinguished from knowledge, fact or truth which is deemed to be impersonally certain and universally valid. For instance, the sentence, “The earth revolves around the sun” in Galileo’s book entitled Dialogue Concerning the Two World Systems (1632) was a matter of personal opinion in the 17th century, which was identified with the individual person, Galileo. He could save his life by acknowledging that the sentence was merely his uncertain opinion and withdrawing his truth claim during the final session of the Roman Inquisition. However, heliocentrism is no longer regarded as a matter of personal opinion but a matter of fact which Pope John Paul II officially endorsed in 2000. Now, heliocentrism is the established truth regardless of who says it. Indeed, it would be considered an unintelligent anachronism, if one says “In my opinion, the earth still revolves around the sun.” In brief, the point is that, viewed in contrast to the notion of truth which is universal and impersonal (Krippendorff, 2009a), opinion is associated or identified with a concrete individual person.

 

2.1.2. Public   The ‘public,’ having etymological roots in the Latin populous, means “pertaining

to the people as a whole; that belongs to, affects, or concerns the community or nation” (Oxford English Dictionary). The ‘public’ as a collective term has more to do with impersonality than individuality in that it is inclusive of every-related person. Such

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usages as ‘public office,’ ‘public property,’ ‘public broadcasting,’ and ‘public library,’ to name a few, demonstrate the impersonal nature of something qualified by the ‘public.’ In those examples, the ‘public’ is attributed to everybody and cannot be reduced to a single person. Books in public libraries belong to everybody, namely, to no particular person. One person may be able to temporarily borrow a book from his local community library, but cannot possess it permanently on his personal bookshelf. Public broadcasting should be available and accessible to all people in a nation and, thus, must be impervious to commercial private interests. The catch phrase of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), “Nation shall speak peace unto Nation,” nicely summarizes the spirit of universal service of public broadcasting that there should no exclusivity in access to broadcasting for either speakers or audiences. Public officials must serve the general interest of the people in their entirety, not the special interest of a few individuals. When a public official exercises power for his private benefits, he is charged with political corruption; or, if he implements policies for the benefit of a few identifiable persons, he will be subject to criticisms of nepotism. Therefore, the ‘public’ repudiates identification with concrete personality in favor of ‘universality’ in that the public pertains to everybody, and ‘impersonality’ in that everybody is an unidentifiable ‘no-body’ (Peters, 2005).

 

2.1.3. Public Opinion1

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There are subtle variations depending on language. The English words ‘public opinion’ are the translation of the French, l’opinion publique coined in the 18th century. In French, public(m) or publique(f) is exclusively used as an adjective or adverb, while in English public can be used as noun and adjective. In German, oeffentliche meinung is used to mean public opinion instead of publizierte meinung (published opinion).

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My brief analysis shows that understanding the concept of ‘public opinion’ requires a conceptually difficult, if not impossible, attempt to integrate opinion’s individuality and embodied personality with public’s universality and impersonality. As the historian Mona Ozouf (1988) notes, ‘public opinion could not exist without individual opinion-that is, without independent beings capable of opining’ (p.S13) and, at the same time, public opinion is ‘the voice of all, thus the voice of no one’ (p.S11). Public opinion as an instance of human voice exists only through a concretely embodied person to whom the ownership is identified and attributed. Every opinion is basically possessed by someone whose voice has differing dialectic features. Nevertheless, public opinion as the voice of the people as a whole should not be reducible to or identifiable with particular persons. If so, it no longer exists as public opinion but as private opinion, which may be disguised or manipulated as public opinion. Bearing in mind this fundamental contradiction inherent to the concept of public opinion, this chapter will (1) review how theorists of public opinion respectively holding idiologic, sociologic and nomologic perspectives have attempted to resolve the contradiction, (2) compare how they view public opinion polling, and (3) propose a new perspective anchored on dialogism in human communication.

In East Asian countries like China, Korea and Japan where Confucian social diagrams had dominated for several centuries, public opinion was conceptually divided according to the lines of social classes before the modern era. On the one hand, 輿論 (yo-ron: literally, dispersed discourse) or 輿情 (yo-jong: dispersed sentiments) was a term ascribed to the lower classes. On the other hand, 公論 (gong-ron) was a consensus reached through public meetings (公議: gong-ui) among the representatives –mostly, the elders – within the noble class. In early modern Japan where class systems were abolished, the two words were merged, and 公議輿論 in combination was used as an interim translation of the Western concept of public opinion. However, 輿論 alone is nowadays in wide currency, epitomizing democracy’s triumph over aristocracy.

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2.2. CRITICAL DEBATES ON PUBLIC OPINION

     

2.2.1. Idiologic Perspective:              Public Opinion as the Aggregate of Individual Opinions  The idiologic perspective2 emphasizes the individual personality as the

precondition of public opinion, namely, that an opinion only can be spoken by a concrete individual person. Consequently, theorists who hold the idiologic perspective see that the fundamental contradiction of public opinion can be resolved by deconstructing the concept of ‘public’ conceived as an abstract ‘imaginary’ entity and reconstructing it as the arithmetic sum of individual opinions. As explicitly addressed in the article that social psychologist Floyd Allport (1937) contributed to the first issue of the Public Opinion Quarterly, idiologic theorists contend that the metaphoric and metonymic descriptions of public opinion are a far cry from the ‘denotable reality’ of opinion. First, according to Allport, public opinion should not be metaphorically personified as if the public as a ‘super-organic being’ were ‘spoken of as turning its gaze, now this way, now that, as deciding, and as uttering its opinion’ (Allport, 1937. p.8). ‘Public’ is merely a collective adjective, and it is absurd to say that the public as a noun acts and speaks in the same way that an individual person does. The personified public thus is a ‘fiction’ in which ‘a collective term’ is used as ‘the subject of a verb denoting action.’ Second, ‘the group fallacy of the public’ and ‘the confusion of public 2

The title ‘idiologic’ is my own terminology derived from the Greek ‘idiotikos.’ Idiotikos means private as opposed to koinos (common, related to public office). Idiotes (layman) is the etymological root of the English word ‘idiot.’ A modern concept closer to idiotes, however, is ‘mass’ understood as ordinary individuals not directly engaging in public matters. Here, it is notable that Zaller, for example, uses the term ‘mass opinion’ instead of public opinion for his book title, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (1992).

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opinion with the public presentation of opinion (the journalistic fallacy)’ are also misleading, because in these conceptions a part (interacting groups and journalists) only metonymically represents the whole (‘many individuals’). Instead, idiologic theorists -under the aegis of logical positivism which strived to eliminate metaphors and metonyms from the realm of scientific language -- posit that the linguistic construct of public opinion should be operationally defined as something corresponding to observable reality, which ultimately amounts to specific individual opinions. 3 Opinion polling developed by George Gallup, Archibald Crossley and Elmo Roper during the early 1930s is a scientific enterprise to institutionalize this idiologic concept of public opinion that has gradually become a dominant paradigm (P. Converse, 1987; Herbst, 1993). The shaping of opinion polling owes, on the one hand, to the development of psychological techniques that measure private attitudes and opinions and, on the other hand, to probability theories and statistical techniques that sum up and generalize individual opinions from a cross-section of the general population (J. Converse, 1987). Within this matrix, opinion is operationalized as the verbal manifestation of intraindividual or privately-held attitudes, and public as the arithmetic aggregate of separate individuals that is, in most cases, a national electorates -- e.g., the ‘American’ public (Gallup & Rae, 1940). Public opinion polling, hence, seeks to preserve the meanings of 3

Critiques of the idiologic perspective (e.g., Blumer, 1948; Bourdieu, 1979; Champagne, 2004) maintain that idiologic theorists naively believe that public opinion exists out there as an isolated object waiting to be measured, and insist that opinion pollng actually measures non-public private opinions. But this criticism is not unambiguously warranted, given the idiologic perspective’s origins in logical positivism. Concerning logical positivism, Ian Hacking (2000)’s discussion about the genealogical connection between logical positivism and social constructionism within the Kantian framework of knowledge is useful. He points out that “logical positivism, usually thought of as antagonistic to constructionism, was also deeply committed to the construction metaphor” (p.42). That is, even for idiologic theorists, the language of public opinion is not immediately the same as the reality of public opinion. Rather, I would say, the sum of individual opinions is constructed or performed as public opinion through the mediation of pollsters.

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individuality and embodied personality of opinion by separating individual persons from the stream of social communication, and universality and impersonality inherent to the public by redefining the ‘public’ as the sum of individual opinions within a given boundary. The idiologic perspective on public opinion is well suited to the ideal type of liberal democracy in which the voice of individual persons, as they are severed from social bonds, must be counted with equal weight. Scientific polling technology is claimed to provide equal chances to be represented to every individual voice, because participation in survey interviews is determined in accordance with statistical randomization, while precluding self-selection of some previledged segments of the population (Verba, 1996). Without these scientific measures, public opinion amounts to the voice of ‘loud minorities’ whose metaphoric or metonymic uses of the language of public opinion may suppress the voice of ‘silent majorities.’ In a nutshell, public opinion from the idiologic perspective (1) should be concrete individual opinions rather than metaphoric and metonymic representations (public opinion), and (2) must be a mathematically aggregated voice with equal weight so that the voices cannot be attributed to a specific personality (public opinion).

  2.2.2. Sociologic Perspective:                           Public Opinion as Social Discourse or Group Opinion   Sociologic theorists define public opinion as collective opinions arising from the formation of discursive or group solidarity. They approach the extra-individual nature of

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‘public’ by analogy to a more general term ‘society.’ Just as a society is more than a mechanical sum of isolated individuals, public opinion should not be postulated as the aggregate of individual opinions. There are two sociologic strands in regard to the formation of solidarity. One strand of the sociologic perspective focuses on the role of public communication in producing public opinion. One of the earliest theorists of this position is the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde (1901) who, reflecting on the Dreyfus Affair, saw that the printing press created a precondition for the emergence of modern public opinion by expanding the horizon of average citizens and bringing political agenda to informal conversations that, otherwise, would be nothing but gossip talking (Ginneken, 1992; Katz, 1995). Similarly, the Chicago sociologist Charles Horton Cooley notes that ‘public opinion is no mere aggregate of separate individual judgments, but an organization, a cooperative product of communication and reciprocal influence’ (Cooley, 1998/1909, p.185). Thanks to the advancement of communication technologies, notes Cooley, “social contacts are extended in space and quickened in time, and in the same degree the mental unity they imply becomes wider and more alert” (ibid, p.104) and “in politics communication makes possible public opinion which when organized is democracy” (ibid, p.106). From this perspective, an individual opinion develops into public opinion through the coalition with other people’s opinions in the process of public communication. Thus, the idiologic model of public opinion does not sufficiently grasp the dynamic discursive processes in which the purview of individual opinions are expanded beyond gossip and transformed into public opinion.

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Another strand of the sociologic theorists such as Herbert Blumer (1948), Pierre Bourdieu (1979) and Benjamin Ginsberg (1986), who still remain as the most incisive critiques of opinion polling, understands public opinion as the mobilized opinion formed by cohesive social groups such as political parties, functional groups and social movements. For these theorists, a public is a sociologically discernable organization characterized by associational cohesion and mobilization, and public opinion is distinctively ‘formulated’ opinions in the process of cohesion and mobilization. In contrast, ordinary opinions are merely indistinct expression of individual inclinations that have not yet reached the stage of collectively expressed opinion. For instance, Blumer (1948, p.544) argues that; “the formation of public opinion does not occur through an interaction of disparate individuals who share equally in the process. Instead the formation of public opinion reflects functional composition and organization of society. The formation of public opinion occurs in large measure through the interaction of groups.” Once public opinion is defined as mobilized group opinion, opinion polling is conceived as a distortion of reality, because it does not reflect the mobilization process. First, for sociologic theorists, “public opinion does not exist” (Bourdieu, 1979) in the same way that is measured by public opinion polling. Opinion polling presents an incorrect description of a society as if it were composed of disparate individuals having equal weight. Because individuals interact with each other forming groups and, in that process, certain individuals are disproportionately more influential in mobilizing public opinion, the picture taken by opinion polling is a distortion of social reality. As often

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pointed out, the success of “the National Rifle Association (NRA) in formulating policy incongruent with the opinions and preferences of a majority of individuals [reflected in opinion polls] is an obvious example” (Salmon & Glasser, 1995. p.442). Second, opinion polling promotes a false consensus; even though the real political world teems with political conflicts and divisions surrounding various social issues, opinion pollsters say as if there were a single consensus or a definite majority opinion. The statistical description of public opinion, especially, leads to the ideological effect in which the false consensus described in opinion poll reports harnesses political dissents and lessens the significance of civic participation. In this regard, Ginsberg asserts that opinion polling is an administrative tool to manufacture consent and suppress conflicts stemming from bottomup social movements: “Ironically, some of its early students believed that polling would open the way for ‘government by opinion.’ Instead, polling has mainly helped to promote the governance of opinion” (Ginsberg, 1986, p.85).

  2.2.3. Nomologic Perspective:                           Public Opinion as Deliberative Opinion  Even though both nomologic and sociologic theorists share the view that public opinion arises from social communicative processes, there is an important difference between the two, because the former theorists add a normative standard in conceptualizing public opinion. Regarding the contradiction of public opinion, nomologic theorists see that the contradiction can be resolved by distinguishing the qualitative difference between public opinion and private opinion: public opinion is a reflexive opinion that an individual person holds, after engaging in ‘public’ debates with other 19

individuals who hold opposite positions, whereas private opinion is an unreflexive superficial opinion that expresses merely vague predispositions. The nomologic conception of public opinion is founded on the bedrock of the historic models of the ‘public sphere,’ which has been popularized by Habermas’ The Structural Transformation of Public Sphere (1962). Exemplified by Greek agora, British coffeehouses, French salons, German tischgesellshaften, and American town halls, public sphere, existing outside the home -- the locus of private life and ordinary conversation, is the social and physical space of impersonality open to everybody, in which private opinions are challenged, crystallized and transformed into public opinion. Recently, Habermas has posited that deliberation in the public sphere works as “a cleansing mechanism that filters out the ‘muddy’ elements from a discursively structured legitimation process” (Habermas, 2006. p. 416). In a similar vein, Gutmann and Thompson (1996, p.93) describe public opinion as the opinion deliberated vis-à-vis disagreements: “Citizens put their moral beliefs to the test of public deliberation, and strengthen their convictions or change their minds in response to the arguments presented in a politics governed by reciprocity”. Seen in this way, social discourse and mobilized group opinions which sociologic theorists champion do not necessarily fulfill the standard of public opinion, especially when those opinions, lacking a chance to be exposed to disagreements, are uncontested group opinions shared by like-minded people (Sunstein, 2000). By the same token, individual citizen’s opinion can be considered as public opinion, once the opinion has been reached through the process of public deliberation.

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Normologic theorists disagree with the idiologic perspective in that an individual private opinion that idiologic theorists take as the primary reality of public opinion is the unreflexive one. The characterization of private opinions as superficial opinions is, as it were, consonant with Walter Lippmann’s criticism of modern public opinion. For Lippmann (1924), ordinary opinions—namely, what is mistakenly termed ‘public opinion’ – are saturated with shallow information provided by the press, ideological stereotypes and economic self-interests, which are far from the ideal of public opinion. While Lippmann regards the deliberative conception of public opinion as the product of philosophical idealization, namely, the ‘phantom’ public, nomologic theorists take it up as a democratic project. In criticizing opinion polling, thus, nomologic theorists (Habermas, 2006; Fishkin, 1995) question the value of opinion polling, unlike sociologic theorists who are mainly skeptical about its utility for observing the formation of public opinion. For the nomologic theorists, opinion polling merely reflects uninformed and unconsidered opinions of the ‘weak publics’ created by the mass media and ordinary conversation; “these attitudes are influenced by everyday talk in the informal settings or episodic publics of civil society at least as much as they are by paying attention to print or electronic media” (Habermas, 2006. p.416). In proposing the institutional implementation of deliberative polling that would reflect deliberated opinions, James Fishkin (1995, p.80) also castigates current public opinion polling that, according to him, at best, measures “a vague impression stemming from headlines and sound bites4 or from 4

Regarding the relationship between public opinion and mass media, it is interesting that Habermas and Fishkin associate the media with ordinary non-public opinion, whereas Gabriel Tarde and Elihu Katz see that the media gives rise to public opinion by bringing political agendas to informal talks that, otherwise, might be no more than gossiping.

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brief conversations with friends who also may have thought little about the issue’ or, at worst, non-existent pseudo-opinions.” Table 2.1 presents a summary of varying definitions of public opinion depending on idiologic, sociologic and nomologic perspectives and illustrates the major points of controversy among them.

Table 2.1 Three Perspectives on Public Opinion From the Idiologic Perspective

From the Sociologic Perspective

From the Nomologic Perspective

Statistical Aggregate of Individual Opinions

Unbiased and impartial measure of public opinion

Unrealistic picture of public opinion disregarding social organizations

Representation of unreflexive private impressions

Collective Group Opinions

Metaphoric abstraction or metonymic partial representation

Public opinion in real socio-political process

Homogenous opinions among like-minded people (‘Echo chamber’)

Deliberative Opinions

Romantic fiction idealized by philosophers (‘Phantom public’)

Collective process (e.g., social movements, interest groups) rather than a normative ideal

Rational opinion developed through public debates

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2.3. DIALOGIC PERSPECTIVE: PUBLIC OPINION AS COORDINATION WITH THE THIRD PERSON

The dialogic perspective that I put forward differs significantly from the aforementioned idiologic, sociologic and nomologic theories in that, while the three theories start with a predetermined set of definitions as to what is public opinion or what should be considered as public opinion, dialogism without recourse to an a priori theory of public opinion seeks to explicate the communicative logic embedded in the practice of public opinion, and to critically analyze what is socially defined as public opinion and how it is produced and then communicated. In other words, from the standpoint of dialogism, public opinion is a social category by which a plurality of people communicatively coordinate with others in real life rather than an abstract category which academicians try to theorize according to their assumptions and preferences. Although it should be admitted that some proponents of dialogism may be more or less sympathetic to sociologic or nomologic arguments (e.g., Hauser, 2001), the central point of dialogism lies in viewing public opinion as a performative speech genre and investigating how such performative linguistic and meta-linguistic practices constitute our experiences of public opinion.

  2.3.1. An Outline of Dialogism5  5

The term, ‘dialogism’ (Holquist, 2002) was initially derived from Bakhtin and his Russian colleagues’ (Medevev, Voloshinov, and, putatively, Vygotsky) notion that communication is the primary reality of human beings. Instead of limiting dialogism exclusively to Bakhtin circle, however, I use it as broadly referring to the attempts to provide an account of human communication without relegating it to an epiphenomenon of psychological, sociological, or technological phenomena. Dialogism in my usage

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Dialogism can be defined as a study of the logic embedded in the constitution of various personhoods and relating communicative practices based on them. As the etymological roots in the Greek δια (‘across’ or ‘through’) and λογος (‘word’ or ‘spirit’) implicate,6 dialogism concerns, most of all, languages and communications between human persons. In other words, dialogism posits that the ontological uniqueness which separates human beings from other non-human beings should be found in the dialogic relations among human persons, and a study of human person must be founded on investigating the dialogicality embedded in communicative practices. While dialogism concerns signs and languages, however, dialogism differs from semiotics and formal linguistics which afford no account of human persons who use signs and languages in relation to others (Krippendorff, 2009a). Semiotics and formal linguistics seek to abstract textual meanings, syntactic structures, dictionary registers and universal grammars by bracketing the utterances voiced by embodied human persons. Divorced from the stream of communication, Bakhtin points out, signs and languages as conceived in those disciplines are voiceless and disembodied. The sentence as a unit of language [linguistics], like the word, has no author. Like the word, it belongs to nobody, and only by functioning as a whole utterance does it become an expression of the position of someone speaking individually in a concrete situation of speech communication. (Bakhtin, 1986. p.84)

encompasses, disregarding many variations, social pragmatism (Cooley, Mead, Goffman), pragmatics of language (Wittegenstein, Austin, Searle, Benveniste, Hymes), phenomenology of human person (Husserl, Buber, Scheler, Schutz, Levinas, Ricoeur) and second-order cybernetcs (von Foerster, Krippendorff) as well as Bakhtin circle's dialogism. 6 The Asian concept of the human person as 人間 (meaning ‘between man and man’) also shows a strong dialogic understanding of the human person as existing across languages and communications.

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As Bakhtin’s (1984) terminology of ‘metalinguistcs’ in distinction from formal linguistics suggests, for dialogists, ‘sign,’ ‘language,’ ‘ideology’ and even ‘culture’ must be analyzed in regards to the extralinguistic coordination among human beings. That is, language in dialogism is a matter of communication in general: “The study of language so conceived is properly not linguistics, but communication. The study of communication differs from the study of language as such … in a number of ways … the fundamental of which is that in communication there is no point at which the speaker may be thought of as an isolated entity” (Holquist, 2002. p.59). Furthermore, the realm of dialogism is not limited to the ‘interpersonal communication’ which, albeit its semantic affinity with ‘dialogue,’ mainly deals with communications between two people —e.g., direct interactions between family members and friends. This tendency stems from the erroneous imputation of the etymology of ‘dia’ (across) to ‘dya’ (dual) (Linell, 2009). That is, dialogue does not necessarily mean a dual-logue, a reciprocal communication between two people. Rather, dialogue is a global concept that includes all kinds of communication between human persons: “dialogue can also be understood in a broader sense, meaning not only direct, face-to-face, vocalized verbal communication between persons, but also verbal communication of any type whatsoever” (Voloshinov, 1973. p.95).7 Therefore, the frameworks of dialogism of which I make a thumbnail sketch below incorporate various personhoods in terms of first person, second person and third 7

In this sense, I propose that dialogism be seriously taken as the ‘constitutive model of communication’ suggested by Robert Craig (1999), because dialogism offers accounts of the first-order communication theory from which other second-order models including the transmission model are derived.

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person and the dialogic and non-dialogic, and, immediate and mediated relationships between them (I-Thou, I-You, I-He/She, I-We, I-They).

First Person  

In dialogism, an individual person constitutes the first-order reality, who is neither reducible to a material entity nor combinable with and replaceable by other individual persons. Criticizing the intra-individual notions like cognitivism and naturalism that tend to reduce an individual person to psychological and biological properties, on the one hand, dialogism posits that an individual person is an agent irreducible to a part constituting a human body. For the hardcore cognitive and neuroscientists, “nobody has been or had a self” and the self is merely an illusion produced by the brain which is ‘a purely physical object’ (Metzinger, 2009. p.1) similar to a laptop computer. To take an example, the statement “I remember” can be equated with “The brain contained in a certain body retrieves information from the saved memory pool,” because the I is nothing but the brain and remembering amounts to an informational computation processed by the brain. From dialogism, however, there is an unbridgeable gulf between the two statements: whereas the former involves an account based on the agent that intentionally and/or spontaneously performs an action, the notion of human agency is vitiated in the latter, as if an individual person were nothing but a mechanical automaton computing information according to pre-determined neurological algorithms. An individual person is an organic whole to whom the agency of actions, intentions, thoughts, feelings, perceptions and memories is

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ascribed, although this action undoubtedly involves certain mechanical and biological functions of the human body. On the other hand, dialogism disagrees with the supra-individual notions that, while valorizing collective terms such as ‘culture,’ ‘society,’ ‘market,’ ‘nation,’ ‘class,’ ‘structure’ and the like as the singular agent of their theoretical accounts, totalize individual persons by means of conceptual categories, as if human persons could be combined or merged into one entity, and as if an individual person could be functionally replaced with another within a system. For dialogists, an individual person is primarily a unique being that exists prior to any collective bodies, and institutions only secondarily come into existence especially through the language of personification metaphors and ‘performative’ speech acts (Searle, 1969). That is, social institutions and organizations constitute the second-order reality constructed through the implementation of social contracts among individual persons. Thus, a statement like “The market sternly rejected governmental regulations amid the economic downturns,” wherein a collection of producers and consumers appear as an independent singular agent, can produce an ideological effect by suppressing the multiplicity of individuals, unless the secondorderedness of such collective bodies is revealed. Dialogism which places an individual person as ‘the basic particular’ (Strawson, 1959) of the first-order reality also disagrees with atomic individualism in which an individual person is described as a self-sufficient monad indifferent to other individuals. Most of all, in dialogism, an individual person exists as the first person, namely, the author of the ‘I’ that is declared in communication with other individuals. It is here

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crucial to understand that the I is not merely a personal pronoun which, as a linguistic component, stands for someone’s name. Rather, the I is an existential deixis or index8 of the person authoring self-referentially herself as the agent of her perceptions, emotions, intentions, actions etc (Mühlhäusler & Harré, 1990). As Benveniste (1971. p.197) points out, the first personhood constitutes the condition of subjectivity, because “in saying I, I cannot not be speaking of myself.” The first personal index ‘I,’ notes Sokolowski (2008. p.13) directly expresses the I as acting as a responsible agent: “there is a difference between ‘It is snowing outside’ and ‘I see that it is snowing outside’ …... When I use I as a declarative, I explicitly manifest myself in the act of manifesting the world …... A statement like ‘I see that it is snowing outside’ manifests us as persons-who-are-actingas-such at the moment we say these words.” The flipside of the first personhood as the responsible agent is I’s directedness toward other individuals, or the alters. The first personhood is dialogically established vis-à-vis or in face-to-face with others, precisely because one cannot not assume the existence of others outside oneself, when he reflexively declares himself as the I. A person becomes the first person, I, only in relation with others, and in this sense, a human agent becomes a dialogic author. When a man has a headache, for example, he may take a pill to alleviate his pain. This is purely a pre-reflexive reaction to headache, and no consciousness of the self, such as “I am sick,” “I must take a pill” and the like concomitantly occurs in his action, if we provisionally set aside the situation of internal

8

An easy example of an index is smoke existentially linked to a fire, which as a part of fire directly indicates its existence. Pathological symptoms are also an existential index of disease.

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conversation9 or the solitary imitation of dialogue. It is in dialogue with another individual person, say, his girlfriend that the man establishes the ownership of his headache (e.g., “Honey, I’m so sick”) and ascribes the agency of taking a pill to himself. Therefore, the I and the other, or the ego and the alter are mutually interdependent: “neither of the terms can be conceived of without the other; they are complementary” (Benveniste, 1971. p.225). The establishment of the first personhood requires dialogue with others, and, at the same time, the declaration of the reflexive I as the unique responsible agent is necessarily directed towards others. Consequently, the relationship between ego and alter is realized through the dialogic relationship between addressor and addressee in which the addressor is the author of speech disclosing oneself as the first person, and the addressee is the person to whom the signification of the speech is directed.   Second Person 

The second person indicated informally by ‘Thou’ or formally by ‘You’ refers to the others to whom, being immediately present, the speech of the first person is directly addressed, and who, in taking turns, can address herself as the first person making the initial first person the second person. The spatial and temporal deixes such as ‘here,’ 9

The capacity to perform internal conversation develops through conversations with parents during childhood. That is, external conversation ontogenetically precedes internal conversation. This is the reason that human thinking is structured by the ‘mother tongue.’ Then, the question is how internal conversation develops from external conversation. One strand of explanation is that internal conversation is an imitation of external conversation, and when one engages in internal conversation, she takes turns with herself (Archer, 2003). This explanation, however, is unsatisfactory, inasmuch as it presupposes multiple personalities as the normal state of mind. Do we indeed address a speech to ourselves, when we think? I don’t think so. Internal conversation is actually not a conversation at all. Internal conversation is, rigorously speaking, a metaphor of self-reflexive thinking in which addressivity is no issue. My alternative hypothesis is that, when one is talking to another, there are always two hearers –the person addressed and oneself addressing. That is, when one speaks, he, as an unaddressed hearer, cannot help overhearing his own voice, and the experience of overhearing his own voice forms the basis of self-reflexive thinking.

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‘there,’ ‘now’ and ‘today,’ to name a few, reveal the nature of immediate dialogic presence of the second person, because those deixis have only self-referential meanings completely depending on the relationship between the two persons. Notably, ‘here’ indicates the place from which the first person speaks, and ‘now’ indicates the temporal moment when the first person speaks. In a word, the second person is the one with whom the first person presupposes to share a co-referential horizon in which the second person is expected to comprehend what is specifically referred to, when and only when the language employed by the first person is indexical. Now, let’s suppose that we inadvertently overheard someone's telephone record, “Hey sweetie, I can come there late tonight.” Since we are merely an overhearer to whom the message is not addressed, we do not know who the person indexed by the ‘I’ is, which place the ‘there’ refers to, and which date the ‘late tonight’ means. Every person, every place, and every night respectively can be encoded as the ‘I,’ ‘there,’ and ‘late tonight.’ It is only to the second person addressed as the ‘sweetie’ by the author of the message that those personal, spatial and temporal deixes are specifically intelligible. Although an overhearer and an addressee might have listened to the same message, they share nothing in common except the physical qualities of the sound, because the overhearer exists outside the dialogic horizon.10 As Rommetveit (1974. p.36) puts it,

10

This is a simple case where the dominant message effect models fail. Message effect models assume that the same message of the same content has the same effect, if the statistical traits of receivers of the message remain same. However, communication is more than correlation between message and mental states, because communication involves addressivity toward alters or what Levinas (1981) calls ‘an original communication behind the de facto communication.’ This insight also sheds fresh light on why persuasive messages composed of ‘exemplars’ (Zillmann & Brosius, 2000) such as human stories in which a person discloses oneself as the first person are consistently more effective than the ones presenting ‘base-rate information’ consisting of the statistical data devoid of most dialogic qualities.

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“such a here-and-now remains vacuous or at best only arbitrarily defined until the interpersonal speaker-to-listener coordinate of the act of speech has been determined as well.” Note in addition that such spatial and temporal deixes are intersubjectively established rather than individually invented through implicit contract: that is, when deixes are used, the first person presumes that the second person shares understandings of what those deixes refer to, and vice versa. As intersubjectively established, the position between the first and second persons can become freely interchangeable in the ‘authentic conversation’ (Krippendorff, 2009a; 2009b). Participants in conversation, indexed by the informal I-Thou rather than by the formal I-You, maintain mutual understanding of each other, spontaneously organize their conversation without monitoring or overhearing third-parties, take turns and switch topics not being constrained by governing rules, allow dialogic equality for others to speak for themselves, open the possibilities of new realities which would be impossible in individual monologic thinking, and continues their conversation endlessly changing spots and time despite unintended intermissions and interruptions. Although at first sight the ‘authentic’ conversation may look like an idealized version of dialogue, those features are drawn from the very ‘ordinary conversation’ which we experience in everyday life. This point becomes more conspicuous, when ordinary conversation is contrasted with the ‘institutional talk in interaction’ (Heritage, 1997). Conversation analysis developed by the ethnomethodologist Harvey Sacks (1992a; 1992b) has illustrated how the communication between the first and second persons is constrained in a variety of institutional settings including courtrooms, classrooms,

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customer service centers, police stations, hospitals, universities etc. Within these settings, individual persons appear to each other as social persons --e.g., attorney and defendant, teacher and student, corporate representative and customer, police officer and suspect, journalist and politician, physician and patient, dissertation committee and doctoral candidate and so on. Unlike the ‘I-Thou’ relation in which the face is ‘denuded’ (Levinas, 1981), participants in the ‘I-You’ relation impersonate functional roles by wearing institutionally-entitled linguistic masks. As such, the organization of institutional talks is often pre-scripted and managed by a third-party who is not present at the communicative event, the dialogic relationship between participants is asymmetric, understanding is largely one-sided, there is a formal opening and closing in talk, and the governing rules are implicitly or explicitly applied to the process of taking turns and switching topics. Another peculiarity of the institutional talk, I would add, is that the end of communication is the ends of communication: participants in an institutional interaction communicate in order not to communicate any further beyond the circumscribed communication event.11

Third Person  

The third person is the person who is immediately absent to the first and second persons, and the dialogic relationship with the third person is partial, asymmetric, and mediated. Some theorists have categorized the third person as a ‘non-person’ (Benveniste, 1971) from the rationale that the third person is, by definition, not a direct participant in

11

Chapter 3 will explore these institutional constraints operating in survey interviews.

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dialogue and can only become a topic of speech. According to this view, one can speak about the third person but cannot speak to him. However, this is a hasty conclusion. Let us imagine a situation: After a private discussion about the matter of employing a job applicant, a boss says to his confidant, “I have a next meeting. You tell him, ‘we finally decided to employ you.’” Here, the third person indicated as ‘him’ is truly an absentee from the dialogical horizon existing between the boss and his confidant. But note here also that the job applicant is indicated as ‘you’ in his absence, calling the third person as the second person, as if ‘he’ were present. That is, the boss’ speech has dual addressivity. On the one hand, the addressivity of the speech “I have a next meeting. You tell him” is saturated within the dialogic relationship with the confidant. On the other hand, the speech, “we finally decided employ you,” is directed to the job applicant in his absence via the mediation of the confidant. Later, the confidant tells the job applicant in his presence, “My boss asked me to tell you 'we finally decided to employ you,’” where, in turn, the former indication of ‘you’ is authored by the confidant in his presence, and the latter by the boss in his absence to the applicant. In short, the third person is not merely a pronoun or topic of speech but a real person to whom, in spite of the fact that he is immediately non-present, the first person's speech can be addressed. Of course, such dialogic relation is partial in that the dialogic relation is not mutual, asymmetric in that the addressvity is unidirectional, and mediated in that another person works as the messenger establishing the dialogic relationship.12

12

One may wonder at this point why the dialogic relations with the third person looks akin to the formal ‘IYou’ dialogic relations in institutional settings, since in both cases, the dialogic relation is partial, asymmetric and more or less mediated. This is because the original second person becomes third-

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Following Alfred Schutz’s (1967) classical typology, we can discriminate four classes of third persons --consociates, predecessors, successors, and contemporaries.13 Consociates refer to the third persons who potentially can be called dialogically present as the second person in their presence. As the example above illustrates, the job applicant, while being a third person absent from the dialogic horizon that the first person (boss) indexes as ‘here’ and ‘now,’ could be indicated as the second person, because he is temporarily absent, or, he can be immediately present as the second person in the conceivable future. Therefore, the dialogic relation with consociates such as families, friends, alumni, neighbors, colleagues, and mere acquaintances in their absence is represented by the third person in singular, namely, I-he or I-she, since consociates can appear as embodied singular persons.14 As opposed to consociates, predecessors, successors and contemporaries can never present themselves as the second person. While consociates exist in a discernable place indexed by there, the realm of those pure strangers is yonder or somewhere far beyond there. The world of predecessors whose life does not overlap with the life of the first person is called ‘history’ to which the first person can merely be ‘an observer not an actor’ (Schutz, 1967. p.143). Indeed, the first person may be able to hear the voice of some predecessors in an inscribed form, but it is impossible for successors to address a

personalized in institutional contexts, which I dub as ‘alienation’ -- the process of making others as the extraterrestrial strangers. These alienated others are fundamentally different from the original third persons who, although they are strangers, by default, can be dialogically invited as if they were the second person. 13 I made several modifications in discussing Schutz’s typology. For instance, viewing predecessors and successors as non-responsive persons is my contribution. 14 The social media such as ‘Facebook’ sustain the relationship with consociates at a distance and, furthermore, extend the boundaries of consociates by making possible communication with a portion of contemporaries.

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speech to a predecessor. A vivid example is Roman tombstones placed contiguously to a highway so that the passers-by could read the message engraved on the epitaphs. One of them reads “Read, passing friend, what role I played in the world … And now that you have read, have a pleasant journey” (cited from Veyne, 1987. p.170). Although a passenger, after reading it, might reply, “You also have a pleasant journey in heaven,” this exchange of messages is an unresponsive dialogue, because the dead person is already non-existent to hear the reply. By the same token, successors, to whom predecessors might be able to leave a message and make it transmitted 15 by the tombstone, have not yet come into existence to the predecessors, while they are alive as embodied persons. That is, the deixis of ‘you’ used in both cases does not indicate a real responsive person to each other. For the passenger, the dead person is a no longer breathing, thus, no longer speaking ‘non-person,’ to adapt Benveniste’s characterization of the third person in a rigorous sense. For the dead person, similarly, the passenger was only an imaginary addressee,16 because, before his death, the passenger was not given birth as a real person.

15

Transmission, the dominant model of communication studies (Craig, 1999), can be defined as the delivery or transportation of messages devoid of addressivity. That is, instead of naively arguing that the transmission model is wrong, dialogism can specify when the model can be justifiably used, and when it is not sufficient as an analytical model. 16 Regarding the directedness --or 'intentionality' in phenomenological terminology--of the first person's consciousness toward the third persons, Descombes (2007) claims that monologue is also a dialogue internally performed in the absence of others: “To monologue is to speak to oneself rather than to another. A subejct who is monologuing expresses himself in the absence of others, but he expresses himself the way, he would in their presence. He, therefore, speaks a language that he shares or cold share with others. That is why the monologue ought to be seen as an interrupted dialogue” (p.7). This view echoes Billig's (1991) notion that private thinking has dialogic vestiges, particularly when it comes to political controversy. One's unexpressed opinion is a product not only of psychological attitudes but of personal engagement in public controversy in wider context. That is to say, taking a political position in private thinking is interlocked with the consciousness about the others who hold the opposite positions. But this point should not be exaggerated; whereas certainly there is a dialogical intentionality in monolgue or human thinking, a monologue is not yet a dialogue until it is inserted into a communicative action with really existing persons. Namely, the exterior dialogue between people the must not be confounded by the dialogicality of interior thinking. If so, psychology displaces communication.

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Unlike predecessors and successors, contemporaries are persons who can be responsive at a distance. As the etymology of the compound word consisting of con (together) and temp (time) implies, contemporaries coexist with the first person simultaneously in time in spite of their absence from the immediate dialogical horizon. Furthermore, contemporaries are always already the third person in plural, They, not because of the numerical multiplicity of other individuals but precisely because of the innumerability and impersonality owing to the fact that the They is directly inaccessible to the world of sociability among the singular persons consisting of first persons, second persons, and, sometimes, temporarily absent third persons (consociates). As such, the relationship with the They qua contemporaries requires special ‘mediacy’ (Schutz, 1967) in order to make contemporaries become identifiable, intelligible and/or communicable. One form of the mediacy can be found in the process of identification--the process of a first person’s subscription to social identities of contemporaries through the mediation of other individuals. To begin with, contemporaries are classified in accordance with the dividing lines drawn from religious, regional, linguistic, political and biological distinctions, as exemplified by binary oppositions: god-abiding Jews vs. idolworshiping gentiles, literate Greeks (grammatikos) vs. illiterate babarois, China as the ‘civilized center’ (中華) vs. the rest uncivilized peripheries, Occident vs. Orient, whites vs. blacks. Those social identities abstracted from the classification of contemporaries yet remains as vacuous stereotypical categories, until they are inserted into the encounter between individual persons. It is when an embodied person (i.e., an individual stranger) as the bearer or mediator of social identities appears to the first person that one

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establishes a relation with contemporaries represented by social identities. Encountering a stranger, the first person classifies him either as an insider or an outsider. In this regard, the deixis We which demarcates the insiders from the extraneous aliens serves as the linguistic device by which the first person establishes his personal relationship with contemporaries. For instance, the preamble of the U.S. Constitution which starts with “We, the people of the United States in order to form a more perfect union…” illuminates such a process of identification or subscription. Unlike the We that integrates the addressor and the addressee from the viewpoint of the first person (e.g., “Hey, John, now we can go home.”), the We in the US Constitution suggests a relation between the first and third persons from the viewpoint of certain groups of contemporaries, because the We in this case is not what is originally proposed by the first person. When one simply reads the phrase in solitude, he, having not seen the We, has only vague impressions about it. However, when the first person listens to others’ solemn voices reciting the Constitution on Independence Day, the We becomes concretely embodied, and he, rehearsing the same phrase, is summoned to take the viewpoint of the third person. To put in a different way, through the mediation of another person, the first person is ‘interpellated’ (Warner, 1990)17 or ‘suggested’ to subscribe to a group of contemporaries named the ‘United States’ to the extent that he is momentarily deindividuated and then immersed in patriotism.

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Interpellation, originally chosen by structural Marxist, Louis Althusser as an analytical term for an ideological effect of language, tends to mystify the power of language, because structuralism, while valorizing language as an autonomous agent, ultimately fails to place language in the extralinguistic relations between persons. Thus, the early cultural studies based on the Althusserian interpellation thesis devoted attention entirely to analyzing the structure of media texts, while ignoring the real people who actually interpret them.

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Contemporaries can also be informationalized as the object of knowledge in terms of description and observation rather than subscription and identification. Especially, modern statistics (etymologically, ‘a science of state’) pioneered by Adolf Quetelet, Francis Galton and Karl Pearson has depicted the world of contemporaries as measurable, combinable and calculable by means of numbers. In so doing, statisticians as the observing mediator of the life of contemporaries tell that the world of contemporaries which is called the ‘population’ has its own regularities governed by the law of large numbers, and the realities of contemporaries cannot be directly experienced in the first and second personal relations (Hacking, 1990). While the ‘average man’ may divorce 0.17 times and has 2.2 children, no single person in the real world can divorce 0.17 times and have 2.2 children. And, the chart of crime rates shows that, even though I and my friends have never committed a crime, others whom I do not know constantly do. For an individual person, the artifactual persona of contemporaries is neither the one with whom the I can be identified, nor the one with whom one can speak. Simply put, the contemporaries that exist in this modality are ‘the object of information, but not the subject of communication’ (Foucault, 1979). Finally, there have been attempts at expanding the ‘primary ideal’ (Cooley, 1998) of dialogic relationship to contemporaries through mediated communication. The central thrust of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) is that a nation state is not only a community of social identities (shared languages, religions and blood ties) or a domain of administration represented by statistical information (a census), but also a community of communication among the contemporaries, in other words, a time

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community in communication with those who, although they may have nothing in common, can be responsive by virtue of living in the world at the same time. Whereas historically there have always been contemporaries, viewing the contemporaries as the communicatively responsive third person is a relatively modern phenomenon. Within the matrix of the ‘messianic time’ in which the future is revealed in the past and thus the relation of past and future is conceived as instantaneous, predecessors and successors are only imaginarily linked by an exchange of unaddressible messages, as discussed above. By contrast, according to Anderson, the ‘homogenous empty time’ encoded as the present (e.g.,‘now,’ ‘today’) offers the axis by which contemporaries and their heterogeneous events can be accommodated and juxtaposed on the same space. This is evident in the transformation of print technology.18 In the messianic temporal matrix, print technology, by virtue of its durability and fixity, was mainly used as an inscription tool by which the past events were recorded and the standardized religious canons were preserved over time. The printing press, now equated with journalism, operates with a radically different logic. By virtue of its duplicability, the printing press serves as the communication medium by which the voice of the remote third persons qua con-tempo-raries can be heard and their world becomes intelligible in the real present. Indeed, the printing press is teeming with temporal vocabularies relating to the present—e.g., journalism, newspaper, The Times, USA Today, Newsweek, Frankfurt Allegemeine Zeitung, Les Temp Modernes, OO 新聞 (newly heard), OO 日報(daily report). The printing press followed by radio, television and 18

As Warner (1990) astutely criticizes, McLuhanian technological determinism neglects the human agency in its accounts of media technologies by giving technologies the status of the agent inducing social changes, as if they existed outside/before the world of human persons. Indeed, when McLuhan proclaimed ‘media is the message,’ he meant media as technology sui generis rather than as communicative relationships in technological mediation.

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the Internet more recently may be more often than not replete with the contents of social identities and objectified statistical information in representing contemporaries. Nevertheless, it should not be ignored that mediated communication has attempted to make possible a new sense of the mediated dialogicality19 wherein the voice of the first person is addressed to other contemporaries and he, in turn, hears the voice of other contemporaries addressed to other audiences as well as me, while maintaining the dialogic distance with third persons (Warner, 2002; Scannell, 1996).

  2.3.2. Public Opinion as Reported Speech and Its Repertoire   Going back to the topic of public opinion, we can reformulate the fundamental problem of public opinion as the dialogic problem existing between the first person and the third person in plural. An opinion is basically generated in a relation between the first and second persons, when they dialogically engage with each other in their presence in singular personhood. Especially, in ordinary conversation in which participants are indexically bound, ‘my opinion’ is the opinion possessed by the first person as the addressor of speech, and ‘your opinion’ is the opinion of the second person to which the first person responds. That is, the ownership of opinion can be exhaustively identifiable in conversation. Public opinion, by contrast, cannot be exhaustively identifiable in the relation between first and second persons, because it involves the opinion of the third 19

Another type of dialogicality in mediated communication exists in the modern novels, which literally means news or new story. As Bakhtin vivaciously elaborates in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1984), authors of modern dialogic novels seek to work as the dialogic mediator through whom the voices of contemporaries, without being merged into the author’s own voice, becomes alive to the audiences as others’ authentic voices. Audiences, while reading those novels, do not merely observe or perceive the letters but take part in the world of others by incorporating the third person’s voice to oneself (Poulet, 1969).

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persons who are never directly present in ordinary conversation. The first person can neither address his speech directly to the third person nor immediately respond to them in the same way that he does vis-à-vis (literally, ‘face-to-face’) the second person. Moreover, public opinion cannot be identified with ‘my opinion’ or ‘your opinion,’ precisely because public opinion owing to its relation with a plurality of contemporaries eludes the singular ownership of opinion. In other words, no person in singular is able to possess public opinion, and, thus, the phrase like ‘my public opinion’ or ‘your public opinion’ is oxymoronic, if not impossible. If one ascribes the ownership of opinion to a singular person, it is not public opinion. Or, if one utters the phrase ‘public opinion,’ it is not ‘my opinion’ or ‘your opinion.’ While uttering an opinion is a mundane activity in conversation and every singular person is entitled to be the public, ordinary conversation between the first and second persons falls far short of saturating the meaning of public opinion. This conundrum can be dialogically resolved only by positioning public opinion in the middle between the first and second persons. In other words, public opinion must be represented as the voice belonging to the third person in plural for whom the first person or second person serves as the mediating agent or messenger. When one speaks concerning public opinion, public opinion must be others’ voice distinguished from the personal opinion authored by the speaker. In that sense, public opinion is essentially a reported speech whose ownership is attributed to the third person absent from the dialogic horizon of ordinary conversation. According to Voloshinov (1973), reported speech as the “speech within speech, utterance within utterance, and at the same time also

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speech about speech, utterance about utterance” (p.115) “is regarded by the speaker as an utterance belonging to someone else, an utterance totally independent, complete in construction, and lying outside the given context (p.116).” In short, public opinion as reported speech is third personal voices embedded within the reporting voice of the first person or second person.20 The Latin dictum, vox dei, vox populi, which is still oft-cited as the motto of public opinion, nicely shows the point. As usually construed, the phrase expresses a rudimentary democratic philosophy that the voice of the people in democracy should be taken as if it were the divine imperatives in theocracy. More importantly, it also implies that public opinion as the voice of absent others can be spoken and heard only through the mediating dialogic relation. Just as the voice of the transcendental being can be heard through human messengers, say, oracles, public opinion can only be spoken and heard through various mediating agents such as politicians, journalists, social movement organizers, pollsters and so on. Throughout a variety of such political utterances which

20

Reported speech is conceptually distinguished from ‘repeated speech.’ Repeated speech is the repetition of other’s speech in immediate conversational situations in which the other is present as the co-participant of dialogue, whereas reported speech refers to a repetition of other’s speech in the absence of its speaker. Deborah Tannen (1989) points out that reported speech is uttered in the diachronic horizon, usually but not necessarily, expressed in past tense, and repeated speech in the synchronic horizon.

[Repeated Speech] A: Why don’t we go for lunch now? B: Go for lunch? Hmmm, sorry, I’m too busy. A: OK. No, problem. [Reported Speech] A: He told me we should go for lunch together. B: So what did you do? That was a good chance to talk about your problem. A: Yeah, but I couldn’t have lunch with him. I was too busy.

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those agents generate, public opinion is referred to, claimed, declared, quoted, recorded, photographed, tabulated –or, in a word, reported as the voice of remote contemporaries. Therefore, from the dialogic perspective, one of the central issues of public opinion concerns the dynamics of dialogic relations existing between contemporaries whose speech is reported and intermediary agents who report it.

Earlier investigators of the forms of reported speech committed the fundamental error of virtually divorcing the reported speech from the reporting context. That explains why their treatment of these forms is so static and inert … the true object of inquiry ought to be precisely the dynamic interrelationship of these two factors, the speech being reported (the other person’s speech) and the speech doing the reporting (the author’s speech). (Voloshinov, 1973. p.119)

Here, a few examples will suffice to demonstrate the diversity of the dialogic relations forged between reported speech and reporting speech.

(1) “I, speaking for my people, endorse healthcare reform.”  (2) “We, the people of the United States, endorse healthcare reform.”  (3) “Look, people are saying ‘we endorse healthcare reform’”  (4) “American people say that they endorse healthcare reform.”   

While all four examples commonly have a reference to the third person in plural (‘people’), as people speak that they ‘endorse healthcare reform,’ the dialogic relations presumed in each reporting speech are drastically variable. The first example shows the case in which the first person singular, I, appears as the spokesperson of people. In the

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second, the speaker taking advantage of the grammatical category of first person in plural, We, merges third-person’s voice into his own voice. In contrast to the preceding two examples in which the speakers say as a part of the ‘people,’ the speakers in the third and fourth examples takes a view of observing third parties maintaining distance from the ‘people.’ Furthermore, unlike the third example in which the speaker says using direct quotation as the eyewitness of a live event, the speaker in the fourth completely neutralizes his reporting voice and conceals his authorship. In this respect, adapting Charles Tilly’s (1983) notion of ‘repertoire of collective action’ defined as the alternative means of acting together, I suggest a communicative repertoire of public opinion as the dialogic relationships between reported speech and reporting speech concerning the voice of contemporaries as a whole, and discuss three major repertoires – delegation, mobilization, and observation-- below.

Delegation 

Delegation refers to the reporting style in which a person is formally authorized to speak on behalf of other people whom he represents. As the word ‘behalf’ implies, identity between delegates and those who are represented is only partial. Delegation is elucidated in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651/1985), in which Hobbes discusses two types of personhood – natural vs. artificial – depending on whether “he whose words or actions are considered either as his own (natural person), or as representing the words or actions of an other man, or any other thing to whom they are attributed (artificial person)” (p.217). To paraphrase in dialogic terms, the Hobbesean natural person is the first person

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who authors his own speech and the artificial person is the intermediary agent who in the absence of the first person speaks the words belonging not to the agent himself but to the first person. And ‘authorization’ is the social contractual procedure to grant an artificial person the ‘authority’ to speak on behalf of original authors in their absence. The delegation model of public opinion constitutes the cornerstone of representative democracy wherein periodic election functions as the general means by which the authorization is enacted and the authorship of people is transferred to elected politicians. For instance, George W. Bush as a natural person before being elected could speak his opinions as the author of his own speech. However, once elected, Mr. Bush as an artificial person entitled as President of the United States is deemed to speak the voice authored not by him but by the people of the United States. Accordingly, his official speech declaring a war against Iraq can count as the voice representing people of the United States to the international society. This logic is also internally applied to the legislature. The British Parliament (i.e., House of Commons), once conceived as the ‘organ of public opinion’ (Splichal, 1999) and the U.S. Congress consisting of the Senate and the House of ‘Representatives’ are the governmental institutions in which elected representatives have the authority to speak on behalf of their electorates. Strictly speaking, however, public opinion is assumed rather than concretely spoken in the form of reported speech in the delegation repertoire. Delegates do not have to formally report the voice of their authors (electorates) after authorization, because they are already assumed to have done it, when they were authorized. Even without taking up any specific reporting styles, their personal speech is abstractly assumed to belong to

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their people. For example, candidate’s policies proposed during an election campaign are assumed to be what the electorate has agreed to, once he is elected. Thus, Hannah Pitkin (1967, p.39) points out: “there can be no such thing as representing well or badly; either he represents or he does not. There is no such thing as the activity of representing or the duties of a representative; anything done after the right kind of authorization and within its limits is by definition representing.”

Mobilization 

Mobilization is the style in which the individual voices are amassed and forms a collective body. The repertoire of mobilization is well enumerated in the First Amendment which stipulates: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peacefully to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” These specific repertoires can be understood as a reaction from the governed who have only partial and infrequent representation in delegation (Wood, 1972). In the delegation model, people’s voices can be only sporadically heard through periodic elections, and the nature of political representation is virtual, that is, the consent of the people is, at best, implied. The delegation model may endanger popular sovereignty by enforcing obedience to the law, resulting in legal despotism. In order to counterbalance the power of the representing bodies (i.e., Congress), the First Amendment specifies the right of ordinary citizens to convene and organize themselves into a collective body directly voicing their will unrepresented or

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partially represented in the Congress. The freedom guaranteed by the First Amendment is essentially the freedom to form and/or mobilize public opinion. From the dialogic perspective, the primary feature of mobilization is that the voice of people is reported in the name of the ‘We’ in which intermediary agents’ utterance absorbs the voice of the absent third persons without separating mediators’ and absent others’ positions within the reporting context. Therefore, the size of amassment is rhetorically critical in order for the mediators to claim that the amassed body of the third persons is tantamount to the people as a whole. Since one million people’s voice has a mightier rhetorical force than only ten people’s voice, the intermediary agents often qualify the third-personal voices that they amassed with ‘American’ or ‘national.’ In this regard, publicity serves as the major means by which the amassment is enlarged, because, on the one hand, once publicly expressed, the size of the We looks larger, and on the other hand, through publicity, the scope of mobilization of voices becomes actually wider reaching more people. As Bernard Manin (1997, p.170) notes: “public expression is the key element here. It has the effect not only of bringing popular opinions to the attention of those who govern, but also of connecting the governed among themselves. Indeed, this horizontal dimension of communication affects the vertical relationship between the governed and the government: the more the people are aware of each other’s opinions, the stronger the incentive for those who govern to take those opinions into account.” Thus, it is no wonder that demonstrations are staged in urban public spaces so that a large number of crowds are mobilized to the street performance of public opinion. The dialogic relation here has dual directions in mobilization. In relation to the government, the We’s

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voice is reported as the voice of people with no explicit distinctions between the We and absent others, and in relation to the others not included in the category of the We, the We’s voice invokes and declares that the voice of the We includes the voice of the You.

Observation 

Unlike the models of delegation and mobilization in which public opinion is indistinctively fused with mediators’ speech indexed by the I or the We, the principal feature of observation implemented as public opinion polling is that the voice of mediators is radically dissociated from the voice of the third persons, and the boundaries between reporting and reported speech are sharply circumscribed. As discussed above, Floyd Allport’s criticism of the metaphoric and metonymic understandings of public opinion, as it were, was raised against delegation and mobilization repertoires from the axiom that a multitude of individual persons cannot form a single body. To represent the voice of a multitude of the third persons, on the one hand, the singularity of individual persons must be preserved, and on the other hand, the voice of intermediary agents who count the voice of individual persons must not be inserted into the voice of the third persons. This is the moment where the relationship between political representation and scientific representation are, once dissociated, reassembled together. Regarding the dissociation of politics and science, Bruno Latour (1993) argues by comparing Thomas Hobbes as the protagonist of political representation in the domain of human persons and Robert Boyle as the protagonist of scientific representation in the domain of material

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things: “the representation of things through the intermediary of the laboratory [or observatory] is forever dissociated from the representation of citizens through the intermediary of the social contract” (p.27). This statement may be true concerning the constitution of natural science in the seventeenth century. However, public opinion polling developed in the twentieth century has evidenced that political representation can work together with scientific representation (Osborne & Rose, 1999) by importing the personhood of detached scientific observers to the social intermediary agents (pollsters) and making the voice of third persons an observable phenomenon and calculable information. Indeed, as the word ‘observation’ implies, the public opinion repertoire of observation heavily relies on optical metaphors, as if public opinion were a visible phenomenon rather than an audible voice, because viewing a person at a distance can maintain the third personality of the person observed, while hearing and speaking with him require an I-Thou/You or I-We relationship. Pollsters as scientific observers claim to ‘survey’ (meaning ‘viewing from the above’) opinions of individual third persons by taking a ‘snapshot’ of them, just as geographic photographers take a picture from a birdeye angle. Audiences, despite the acoustic import of the word, actually ‘read’ public opinion on newspapers or ‘watch’ it on television with their eyes.

2.3.3. Dialogic Critique of Public Opinion Polling  Today, a plurality of communicative repertoires of public opinion is available. As Herbst (1998) demonstrated in her in-depth interviews with state-level politicians, journalists and lay citizens, public opinion may refer to newspaper editorials, opinions 49

expressed by grassroots organizations, a talk between politicians and electorates, town hall meetings, petitions, open letters, public rallies, and bumper stickers as well as public opinion polls. However, the fact that repertoires of public opinion are diverse and variable depending on the beliefs subjectively held by individuals does not automatically lead to the conclusion that the ‘sovereign status’ (Lee, 2002) imputed to public opinion polling amongst the plural repertoires is gratuitous. Rather, today, opinion polling constitutes a social reality which is ‘epistemologically objective,’ while it may be ‘ontologically subjective’ (Searle, 1995). In other words, public opinion reported through opinion polling belongs to the domain of collective intentionality whereby an individual person expects that other people believe that opinion polling best represents public opinion, although that person may well doubt the validity of such belief. Furthermore, historically, public opinion polling is the most advanced way of representing public opinion in the sense that it has attempted to overcome the shortcomings of other repertoires. Even admitting that the repertoires of public opinion are plural, opinion polling still should be viewed as a historical progress of the ways of communicating the voice of absent others positioned in the broader process of the shifting of American politics from ‘personal’ (delegation) through ‘interpersonal’ (mobilization) to ‘impersonal’ (observation) relations (Schudson, 1998). That is, rejecting temptations to the romantic narrative which downplays modern opinion polls as a degradation from the golden past, I suggest that opinion polling be seen as a historical achievement that is still open to further advancements and, therefore, worthy of criticism for that sake.

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In this sense, on the one hand, dialogic critique of public opinion polling is an attempt to critically engage in the current state of affairs in the ways of communicating the voice of the third persons. Dialogism as criticism in general aims at ‘emancipation’ (Krippendorff, 2009a) from the two pathologies of human communication in modern society-- reification and alienation. Reification here refers to a process in which a human person is depersonalized and reduced to a speechless material object, or trivialized as a machine performing only pre-programmed actions. Alienation refers to a process in which others are treated as incommunicable extraneous beings (‘aliens’) to the extent that, while the personality is not completely eradicated, institutional or social masks replace human faces and constrain human communication. 21 Concerning public opinion polling, dialogism seeks to critically examine the problems of reification and alienation operating in the process of making the voice of others ‘observable’ rather than ‘hearable,’ specifically, in conducting survey interviews (Chapter 3), deciding the polling agenda (Chapter 4), and reporting the opinion poll results (Chapter 5). On the other hand, dialogic critique is an affirmative critique in that it does not aim to deconstruct anything from what is criticized, and, instead, seeks a renewed social construction. In contrast to the monologic or negative critique (e.g., Marxist critique of capitalism) which leaves little room for human choices except abolishing the object of 21

Another pathology that was prevalent in premodern societies is deification (or idolatry), a process of granting the status of superhuman divinity to a person or thing. The political theology of monarchy was centered on the deity of a singular human person as the ‘son of God,’ and the idea of public opinion termed the vox dei contributed to overcoming the pathology of deification. Habermas’ early work, The Structural Transformation of Public Sphere (1962) is about the historical change from a society of political theology to a society of public opinion. He sees that the mass media in modern society has ‘refeudalized’ the public sphere by resuscitating the political theology of symbolic individuals (‘celebrities’), and this refeudalization suffocates ‘critical-rational debates.’ However, Habermasian criticism of the public sphere, although not completely unwarranted, misses a crucial point about reification and alienation, which are more preponderant in modern society.

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criticism, the dialogic critique aspires to increase the number of alternative choices by establishing a dialogic relation with those who are concerned. To this aim, the dialogic critique of opinion polling suggests that pollsters reclaim the dialogicality in communicating the voice of others by reassembling or reconstructing public opinion polling as a public event (Chapter 6).

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______________ CHAPTER 3 ______________ THE SURVEY INTERVIEW: A VENTRILOQUIST TALK

3.1. THE SURVEY INTERVIEW AS A COMMUNICATION GENRE The concept of public opinion, as discussed in the previous chapter, has been substantively built upon dialogic metaphors wherein the people as democratic citizens address their voices publicly. Being citizens means that people are not merely passive hearers of what governmental bodies announce in the downstream speech form of the injunction or the law but, by definition, active speakers whose voice must be communicated to both the government and fellow citizens (Speier, 1950). Through the dialogic device of public opinion, ordinary people can take up the public speakership which, before the invention of public opinion, had been exclusively reserved for the governmental officials. The sovereignty of the people amounts to this dialogic reversal of public speakership. Indeed, what separates modern democracy from both despotic regimes in which people are the passive hearers of governmental orders and ancient democracy in which governmental voice is purportedly identified with the people’s voice

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is the very exercise of public speakership expanded to every ordinary citizen (Taylor, 2004). 3.1.1. Making Ordinary Conversation Publicly Heard  The moment of historical change in political communication, namely, ordinary people’s public speakership as citizens is most lucidly conceptualized by Immanuel Kant in his article written for a German newspaper entitled “An answer to the question: What is enlightenment?” (Kant,1784). In the article, Kant defines the meanings of ‘private’ and ‘public’ in a way that is diametrically opposite to the traditional sense. The ‘private’ use of reason, he designates, ‘as that use which one makes of his reason in a certain civil post or office,’ because those civic officials ‘must conduct themselves passively in order that the government may direct them’ (p.60). In contrast, he refers to the ‘public’ use of reason the ‘use which anyone makes of it as a scholar before the entire public of the reading world’ (ibid).22 For instance, a citizen as a private person cannot refuse to pay the taxes imposed by the government. The same person as a public person nevertheless can ‘express his thoughts publicly on the inappropriateness or even the injustice of such taxes’ (ibid). Kant saw that the advancement of enlightenment hinges upon the extent to which ordinary people freely speak as the speaking subject of political communication rather than the destination of political commandments.

22

The Kantian term ‘public use of reason’ is often misquoted as ‘the use of public reason’ among political theorists. However, they must be strictly distinguished. ‘Public reason,’ if it refers to a republican idea, namely, a reason based on public interest rather than private interest does not assume any communicative process. In contrast, by ‘public use of reason,’ Kant indisputably had in mind a communicative process in which an opinion is expressed publicly regardless of whether it reflects public interest or private interest.

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How, then, is the old vision of Kant related to public opinion polling? Public opinion polling, while preserving the Kantian vision of ordinary people’s public speakership, departs exactly from the point where the Kantian model stops. Kant as a highbrow philosopher proposed that his self-reflexive model of a ‘scholar’ who addresses his opinions to the reading public be extended to other people. Every citizen must be able to speak his opinions publicly. Therefore, the Kantian motto of public opinion is “Sapere aude!” (Dare to speak!). Public opinion polling in that regards starts with dissatisfaction with the problem of inequality in public speakership. Even though all ordinary citizens de jour may hold public speakership, their voice de facto is not publicly audible with equal chances and equal weight. In spite of Kantian hope for the saturation of his model of voluntary civic participation, the proportion of those who actively exercise the public speakership is a minority, while the vast majority does not have the chance or capacity to do so. Two centuries after the publication of Kant’s article, the issue of ‘voice and equality’ in voluntary civic particiaption (Verba, Schlozman & Brady, 1995) is still one of main topics of political communication; “the voices of citizens may be loud and clear, but they are decidedly not equal” (p.511). In particular, people who have greater educational and economic resources have more chances to express their opinions publicly. In a word, Kantian public speakership is disproportionally distributed. This does not mean that the majority of people do not speak at all. Rather, for opinion pollsters, the fundamental problem is that the voice of people is emitted without receiving public ears. George Gallup, a theorist of public communication as well as a

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founder of opinion polling, deplores the lack of public speakership in ordinary conversation in which the majority of people engage.

[People’s voice] is not voiced at party rallies, but behind locked doors. It is expressed in whispers and jokes, grumbling and curses, when uniforms are hung in the closets and men gather together to talk furtively in small groups. … It is intangible, but it is always present. (Gallup & Rae, 1940: p.7-8. Italics added.)

In this dense passage Gallup does not deny that people talk together with each other. Unlike the modern communitarian portrayal of ordinary citizens as taciturn lonely individuals (Putnam, 2000), Gallup acknowledges that the people’s voice is ‘always present.’ Nevertheless, for him, their voice is only heard in private spaces (‘behind locked doors’) in the speech form of ordinary conversation (‘whispers and jokes’). People’s voice may be loud and clear to the fellow conversants. Yet, their voice remains ‘furtive’ and ‘intangible’ to the public, namely, the third persons not physically present during the conversation. In order for people’s voice spontaneously emitted in ordinary conversation to become public opinion, it should be hearable by those third persons. Ordinary conversation, in other words, must be endowed with publicity, and it requires an intermediary messenger, a missing figure in the Kantian model of public opinion. Gallup examines an array of communications mediated by a messenger, which were claimed to publicly represent the voice of people, or, in dialogic terms, give public addressivity to ordinary conversation. Although ‘letters, telegrams, petitions, delegations’ and ‘the press’ are useful indices of public opinion, Gallup criticizes, the voice publicly

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relayed by such mediated communications is essentially indistinguishable from the mediators’ own voice. Mediators including party organizers, press groups and journalists do not simply work as the neutral messengers of public opinion but strive to shape public opinion, on the one hand, by propagating their opinions and, on the other hand, by merging others’ voices with their own. For Gallup, mediators must not insert their own voice into public opinion but must maintain neutrality in representing opinions expressed in ordinary conversation. It requires an invention of a new type of messenger, and, in that sense, The Pulse of Democracy should be read as the gospel announcing the advent of a new messenger of public opinion -- pollsters. First, following Walter Lippmann’s (1924) resort that social scientists could contribute to democracy by making ‘intelligible’ the social world which otherwise would remain ‘invisible,’ pollsters as social scientists can make the voice of people heard, which otherwise would remain silent, because the majority of people only speak in ordinary conversation. Second, unlike politicians, press groups and journalists, pollsters are deemed not to be a participant in the construction of public opinion but a detached observer or recorder of people’s voice. That is, in order to make ordinary conversation properly hearable, pollsters as disinterested scientist must ‘measure’ the ‘pulse’ of democracy. Now, a paralle between Kant and Gallup becomes more apparent. Whereas Kant suggested that every ordinary citizen speak publicly for himself or herself taking up the model of a scholar, Gallup posits that ordinary conversation in which most people engage can be unbiasedly addressed to the public only through the mediation of social scientific scholars – namely, pollsters.

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3.1.2. Ordinary Conversation and Survey Interviews  The primary communicative interface between pollsters and citizens is interviews. Interview was a new speech genre that had been institutionalized in the early 20th century, first in journalism and then in market research (Schudson, 1994). Webster’s dictionary of 1913 defined an interview as ‘a conversation, or questioning, for the purpose of eliciting information for publication’ and noted that interview is a ‘recent use, originating in American newspapers, but apparently becoming general’ (quoted from Clayman & Heritage, 2002: p.26). Marketing research also began to use interviews to measure consumers’ tastes during the 1920s and 1930s (J. Converse, 1987). When Gallup, who studied journalism and wrote his PhD dissertation23 on the measurement of newspaper readership at the University of Iowa, was devising opinion polling techniques, a new speech genre of interview was already widespread in the United States. In The Pulse of Democracy, he describes the role of interviewers as ‘eavesdroppers.’

The modern polls rely on interviewers (“. . . unbiased persons with good opportunities for observing”) who listen to voters expressing their attitudes in ordinary conversation. … Instead of “sizing up” the attitudes and proclivities of their fellow citizens, the interviewers who travel about America let the people speak for themselves (ibid., p. 31-32, Italics added).

In this passage, Gallup says that the task of interviewers on behalf of pollsters is to listen to what people say in ordinary conversation. Interviewers must not ‘size up’ ordinary 23

Gallup’s dissertation title completed in 1928 was ‘An Objective Method for Determining Reader Interest in the Content of a Newspaper’ (Robinson, 1999)

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conversation but simply let people speak for themselves and listen and record their voice. To modern social scientific academics as well as professional pollsters, Gallup’s portrayal of survey interviews may well sound completely misleading, since no interviewer actually observes conversation which involves at least two conversants excluding the interviewer. The communicative setting that Gallup describes looks like ‘participant observation,’ a nonreactive measure (Webb, Campbell & Schwartz, 1981) in which an observer who is physically co-present with the conversation participants unobtrusively listens to what those interlocutors talk about while keeping dialogic distance from them (see Figure 3.1). However, in the actual process of survey interviews, an interviewer asks questions to an individual (interviewee) who is temporarily severed from the stream of ordinary conversation (see Figure 3.2). That is, a survey interview on which opinion polling relies requires only two parties -- one interviewer and one interviewee, and they are directly engaged with each other – interviewer asking questions and interviewee answering them (Sudman & Bradburn, 1982).

Figure 3.1 Participant Observation

☻ (Unobtrusive Observer) 

☺…………☺                               (Conversant A)                         (Conversant B)

     

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Figure 3.2 Survey Interviews

☺…………☻                              (Interviewee)                                (Interviewer) 

 

Although the confusion seemingly appears to be a trivial category mistake, it reveals an important problem concerning the relationship between survey interviews and ordinary conversation, because opinion polling as a social scientific observation presupposes a prior existence of the object to be measured. In other words, opinion polling presumes that opinions exist empirically or, at least, logically preceding the responses given during survey interviews, and, as Gallup says, that the communicative ecology of the preexisting opinions is ordinary conversation. Survey responses must be equivalent to what people have already spoken (empirical priority), or what people are likely to speak (logical priority) in ordinary conversation, even though they do not have an opportunity to participate in survey interviews (Maynard & Schaeffer, 2002). Otherwise, pollsters claim that they give publicity to ordinary conversation is undermined. If respondents’ opinion spoken within the context of polling interviews sharply diverges from the opinion uttered in ordinary conversation, for instance, if only a portion of survey respondents say “I approve sending troops to Iraq” and a majority of citizens have not uttered, or are unlikely to utter such an opinion in ordinary conversation, pollsters are not a public mediator of ordinary conversation but, in contradiction to pollsters’ premises, a creator of public opinion that does not exist, no matter how a sample of respondents is scientifically selected. 60

In this chapter, I tackle the problem of dialogic correspondence between ordinary conversation and survey interviews. 24 The problem of equivalence can be divided into two aspects – formal and content. First, regarding the formal aspects, this chapter will analyze the structural features of survey interviews in comparison with ordinary conversation, which, specifically, include the communicative relationships or participant roles existing between interviewers and interviewees, the ways in which the sequences of survey interviews are organized, and the institutional features operating in the organization of survey interviews. Second, in terms of content, this chapter will analytically evaluate the degree to which the opinions reported in opinion polls are compatible with the opinions expressed in ordinary conversation. Especially, the analysis will focus on the nature of the valid answers vis-à-vis ‘no opinion,’ because, if the answers recorded as valid actually are not what will be uttered in ordinary conversation, survey interviews cannot be considered to report ordinary opinions. To do this, this chapter will methodologically employ the ‘conversation analysis,’ a qualitative communication research method, for the analysis of actual survey interviews.

24

This is also a problem for the deliberative opinion polling proposed by James Fishkin (1995). His idea is that a deliberative body can sufficiently represent the general population, if the deliberative body is chosen by means of scientific sampling. However, his assumption is contradictory, since he already conceptualized that people consisting of the general population are undeliberative and their opinions are unconsidered. Namely, in order to claim representability, an identity of deliberative opinions developed from the sampled citizens and the undeliberative opinions of the general population should be ensured, which is theoretically inconsistent. In my view, this problem stems from the attempt to meld two different sorts of representation—delegation which dissociates a representative body from the represented bodies, and observation in which a representative body is deemed to be a miniature of the representative bodies. I will go over this issue in detail in the last chapter. P

P

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3.2. METHOD: CONVERSATION ANALYSIS

Conversation analysis (CA) which this chapter will employ in analyzing actual survey interviews was invented by the ethnomethodologist Harvey Sacks (1992a; 1992b; see also Siverman 1998) and Emanuel Schegloff during the 1960s. As the term ‘ethno’methodology implies, conversation analysis is more interested in understanding ‘naturally occurring’ verbal interactions than measuring behaviors in experimental situations. The data, hence, consist of unobtrusive video or audio tape-recordings and transcripts of conversational interactions. The formation of early conversation analysis stems from the findings that ordinary conversations which had been supposed to proceed randomly, in fact, occur according to certain intrinsic orders. In one of the few early publications, for example, Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1977) note that transfer of speakership follows three patterns: a next speaker can be selected by the previous speaker, a next speaker can selfselect, or the present speaker can continue as speaker, when a next speaker keeps silent. As such fragmentary research on conversation has accumulated, conversation analysis has become a coherent research method which pays attention to four core components of a conversational interaction: participant roles, turn-taking organization, sequence organization, and repair organization (Levinson, 1983; Hutchby & Wooffitt, 1998; Ten Have, 1999; Wooffitt, 2005). First, participant roles concern the communicative relationship between the participants (e.g., doctor-patient, teacher-student, business representatives-customers,

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journalists-interviewees). An analysis of participant roles is precedent to other analyses, because the rules of specific conversational interactions largely hinge upon the social or local definition of participant roles. Second, conversations are punctuated by how participants take turns. Research on turn-taking organization addresses the problem of dialogic equality in how turns of talk are allocated and administered, the places where speakers become listeners and vice versa, and lexical units involved in the turn construction. Third, sequence organization concerns the characteristics of mutually binding ‘adjacency pairs’. Adjacency pairs mean the two parts that are interdependent on their counterparts (e.g., greeting-greeting, proposal-acceptance, and question-answer). Fourth, repair organization is the process of repairing one’s speech when a fellow participant does not understand, or needs clarification from his interlocutors. In addition, conversation analysts have paid attention to conversational interaction (or ‘talk in interaction’) in the institutional contexts. Especially, they have analyzed institutional constraints and asymmetries embedded in turn-construction, sequence organization and repair processes (Heritage, 1997; Drew & Heritage, 1992). A central notion relating to investing in the institutional constraints is ‘preference organization’ which means the ways that one party takes a privilege over another in deciding what is preferred and dispreferred in the overall organization of conversational interactions. For the analyses of survey interviews, I will mainly focus on participant roles and preference organization without formally separating analyses of turn construction, sequence organization, and repairs.

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Tape Records 

The data to be analyzed in this chapter come from an audio tape record of the computer assisted telephone interviews (CATI) conducted by the Monmouth University Polling Institute on March 6, 2008. The main topic of survey interviews was the New Jersey governor’s proposals for financial reform, and the poll result was reported by the Gannett New Jersey Newspaper group (see Appendix). The audio tape, approximately 50 minutes long, contains fragments of several interview sessions instead of one full-length interview, because the tape was recorded for the purpose of monitoring the overall interview processes.25

Transcript Protocols 

In making transcripts, I have adopted a few symbols following the conventional protocols of conversation analysis (cf. Hutchby & Wooffitt, 1998; Ten Have, 1999). I

The I represents an interviewer.

R

The R represents a respondent.

[

A left bracket indicates the beginning point of overlap between talks.

]

A right bracket indicates the ending point of overlap.

?

A question mark indicates a rising intonation.

::

Multiple colons indicate prolongation of speech.

-

A dash indicates a cut-off

25

Unfortunately, no opening section was tape-recorded, because this part was not of great concern for pollsters. As a result, I will rely on the questionnaire for the analysis of the opening.

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(0 sec) Numbers in parentheses indicate elapsed time in silence. (( ))

Double parentheses indicate transcriber’s descriptions, usually, of non-speech acts of participants.

Bold letters are an emphasis added by the conversation analyst.

3.3. PRESCRIPTED TALK Survey interviews as an instance of institutional talk like psychotherapy, business consulting, police investigations, journalism interviews etc. are highly goal or taskoriented. This means that institutional talk involves at least one marked stranger whose identity is mainly intelligible by the symbolic markers representing his functional roles and/or institutional affiliations (e.g., uniforms, wigs, title plates, business cards), whilst his personal face still remain unknown by virtue of being a stranger, and that one would never talk with a marked stranger, unless a goal or task is pursued. For example, a patient never visits a doctor’s office for the sake of conversation (e.g., gossiping) but for the special purpose of obtaining a medical diagnosis through the medical ‘interview’ with a doctor (Maynard & Heritage, 2005). In contrast, Harvey Sacks observes that on occasion a conversation is possible among the unmarked pure strangers without bearing a goal or task: “a type of conversation that begins without greetings, indeed without a beginning section. There is a phenomenon that’s being widely observed: In times of public disaster and tragedy people in large cities who otherwise do not talk to each other, develop ‘comeraderie,’ talk to each other” (Sacks, 1972b: p.194). As such, survey interviews

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involve a marked stranger entitled ‘interviewer,’ and a talk between the interviewer and respondents will never happen without the goal of eliciting information from the respondents. On the other hand, the peculiar feature of survey interviews distinct from other institutional talk is prescriptedness of interactions based on a preformulated questionnaire. Other institutional talks largely occur on the basis of mutual contract between the two parties directly involved in the talk, even if the talk may be prescheduled. In survey interviews, however, pollsters, a third party not present during interviews, predetermine the questions to be asked, the time point of interviews, and the respondents whom interviewers will contact. Thus, survey interviewing can be analyzed as the institutional talk occurring involving a marked stranger and prescripted by an invisible third party.

3.3.1. Monological Speaking on Behalf of Someone   How should we conceptualize the participant roles existing between interviewer and respondent? The two personal categories of ‘speaker’ and ‘listener’ are too cursory to be useful for analyzing the participant roles in a conversational interaction. When one vocalizes something, one might well be categorized as ‘speaker’ and the counterpart as ‘listener.’ The category of speaker assumes that the one who voices is the author of the speech, and the category of listener that the other who listens to the sound is the addressee. However, there are ample cases in which the speaker does not coincide with the author, and the listener with the addressee. As Cooren (2010) points out, an individual person often speaks on behalf of other people or an institution. When an ambassador

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communicates with the diplomats from other nations, the ambassador, representing the nation or the government which dispatched her, addresses a speech which does not necessarily belong to herself. Textual materials such as the stop signs at the crossroad function as the proxy representing the voice of an institutional body, say, the department of transportation. The most conspicuous example, however, is the talk performed in a theatrical play. When an actress playing the role of Juliet on stage speaks, the actress does not speak what she as the author of her own speech wants to say but merely recites what the playwright (Shakespeare) wrote in the script. By the same token, when a counterpart playing Romeo listens to the actress’ speech, the speech is not actually intended or addressed toward him. Rather, the speech is primarily directed toward the audiences watching the play. Erving Goffman (1981) elaborated these subtle participant roles in various forms of talk. According to him, there are at least three different persons related to a speaking event. First, ‘author’ is an agent (e.g., playwright) who puts together, composes or scripts the speech to be uttered. Second, ‘principal’ is the roles (e.g., Romeo), positions or beliefs that the speech attests or represents. Lastly, ‘animator’ is the person (e.g., actor) who actually vocalizes the speech. In the unmediated communication, one person simultaneously plays those three different roles as an author, principal, and animator. However, in a mediated communication, the roles do not normally converge, and an individual person playing the role of the animator animates or ventriloquizes what is authored by another person.

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Interviewer’s Role 

Survey interviews belong to mediated communication in which the differentiated roles are played by different persons. As noted, the primary feature of survey interviews is that they are prescripted by pollsters who, while designing questionnaires, are not present in person in an interview. In Goffman’s terminology, the author of survey interviews is pollsters, whereas the authorship of interviewers who verbally interact with respondents is minimized. Namely, interviewers are basically animators relaying or transmitting the voice of pollsters to respondents. Consider the opening section of a survey interview.

Hello, my name is OOOOO.  I'm calling from the Monmouth University  Polling Institute and I'm taking a public opinion survey of New Jersey adults  for the university. I'd like to ask a few questions of the youngest male age 18  or older, who is now at home.   

  After introducing herself as the person affiliated with the ‘Monmouth University Polling Institute,’ the interviewer says ‘I’m taking a public opinion survey’ and ‘I’d like to ask a few questions.’ Here, the subject ‘I’ does not straightforwardly correspond to the verb ‘take’ and/or ‘ask,’ because the person who authors the public opinion survey and decides questions to be asked is pollsters. Interviewers do not ‘ask’ questions what they want to ask but merely ‘read aloud’ the questions that pollsters want to ask. When an interviewer utters “I’m taking a public opinion survey” or “I’d like to ask a few questions,” it conceals the actual act of interviewers who, as an animator, recite or narrate the prescripted questionnaire. For this reason, pollsters often employ the indexical device of 68

‘we’ which combines multiple persons including both pollsters and interviewers as the unified institutional subject of verbs, even though in this particular survey, the interviewer was indexed as the ‘I.’26 At any rate, while interviewers as animators read aloud or deliver questions, they personally need not understand the meanings of those questions, as long as they can articulate the questions with clear audible voices. For example, reading the following lengthy question aloud, interviewers are neither expected to have concrete knowledge of nor personal interest in what the terms like ‘state workforce,’ ‘property tax rebates,’ ‘state aid to many municipalities’ or ‘governor’s budget plan’ concretely mean.

The governor’s budget would make cuts in every state department, reduce  the state workforce, eliminate property tax rebates for higher income  earners, and reduce state aid to many municipalities.  How would you  describe your reaction to the governor’s budget plan – would you say you are  satisfied with it, not particularly satisfied but you can live with it, or you are  definitely dissatisfied with it?     

  The interviewer’s role as a participant in a talk, thus, is linguistically concerned with phonetics rather than semantics, and such a role is comparable to that of talking machine which makes a sound as programmed by the engineers of the artificial intelligence. Just as a person in a Chinese room performs some mechanical actions (e.g., fetching certain 26

A transcript of a survey interview (Wisconsin Continuous National Survey) shows how the collective index ‘we’ is used to represent an institutional identity (see Maynard, Houtkoop-Seenstra, Shcaeffer & van der Zouwen eds., 2002. p.498): .hh uh hi: my name’s: (jane smith) an’ I’m calling from the university Wisconsin? As part  of our national public opinion study? .hhh we’re trying to reach people at their home  telephone numbers? .hhh is this a residential number? 

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Chinese cards) without any semantic understandings of Chinese characters (Searle, 1980),27 it does not matter at all whether or not interviewers understand the questions. The fact that interviewers merely recite questions rather than ask questions implies that the talk between interviewers and respondents is a kind of ‘ventriloquism’ (Cooren, 2010) or ‘shadow conversation’ (Irvine, 1996) in which interactions and coordinations between participants are staged or performed for the benefits of third parties. An actress playing the role of Juliet, instead of directing a speech, say, “O think’st thou we shall meet again?” towards the person in front of her, merely recites the prescripted words regardless of whether or not her counterpart truly believes her statement as directed to him. Rather, the speech is uttered in order to entertain the audiences qua the third party. Likewise, when an interviewer recites questions, she is not particularly interested in whom her speech is addressed to. Unlike the theatrical paly in which the audiences are present, the survey interview is performed solely for the benefits of pollsters absent from the situation. This argument is confirmed by the fact that the respondent to the interviewer is an indifferent person who ultimately amounts to a statistical unit. See this section of making a selection of respondents.

I'd like to ask a few questions of the youngest male age 18 or older, who is  now at home. ((IF NO MALE AT HOME)) Then, may I speak with the youngest  female age 18 or older who is now at home?   

27

John Searle devised a thought experiment in order to reveal the limitations of the artificial intelligence. Computer engineers assert that a supercomputer such as IBM’s Watson, which debuted in a quiz show in 2010, can surpass humans in answering simple questions. According to Searle’s experiment, however, what machine can perform is limited to syntactic operations, and attributing semantics to machine is redutio ad absurdum.

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When an interviewer reads aloud the question asking if ‘the youngest male age 18 or older’ is at home, and, then, no male person is available, she presents another question asking about the availability of ‘the youngest female age 18 or older.’ Here, two points can be observed. First, the respondent represents the abstract social categories based on gender and age. Interviewer does not care with whom she will talk, as long as the respondent fulfills one of the prescribed categories. Second, being a statistical entity, the respondent is replaceable by another. When in ordinary conversation one says “Do you think we shall meet again?,” the person addressed as the ‘you’ cannot be replaced by another person, because the speech is exclusively addressed to the recipient of the utterance. On the contrary, in a ventriloquist talk like survey interviews as well as theatrical plays, the speaker is blind to the person to whom she speaks and, thus, her counterpart is interchangeable with another unit of analysis, inasmuch as the alternative fits the statistical criteria.

Respondent’s Role 

Respondent’s answer to the questions recited by an interviewer is also not intended or addressed toward another person in the anticipation of responses about the answer. First, to respondents, interviewers are not the interlocutors with whom the respondents expect or seek to share a view. While a conversation has a potential to form a common perspective from the interlocutions among the participants, interviews do not involve taking the perspective of others. In terms of turn-taking, interlocution normally

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consists of, at least, three turns as a combined unit (Markova, 1990) and the third turn serves as the confirmation of one’s understanding of other’s perspective. For example:        

Chloe:  That movie was really hilarious!  Jason:  That’s not my cup of tea.  Chloe:  Oh, then, you’re not my cup of tea. 

Let’s suppose that the conversation in this example stopped at the second turn, namely, Jason’s utterance. In that case, the two different perspectives are simply juxtaposed and contrasted without being crossed or merged. It is through Chloe’s third turn (‘Oh, then, you’re not my cup of tea’) that a disagreement between the two conversants is acknowledged. As we shall see, however, the third-turn in survey interviews is not necessary, because respondents and interviewers do not aim to share an understanding about others’ perspectives. Second, in survey interviews, no audiences are conceivable as the addressees of respondent’s speech. In journalistic interviews, an interviewee rightly expects that his answers will be recognized and responded by media audiences, although media audiences are not immediately present as conversational interlocutors (Myers, 2004; Clayman & Heritage, 2002). By contrast, when a respondent gives an answer in survey interviews, he cannot expect that anyone would respond to his answers. A survey interviewer is the person who, in spite of immediate presence, only mechanically delivers questions and records answers on behalf of pollsters. Pollsters also remain as unaddressed overhearers28

28

Conversation analysts often conceptualize media audiences as overhearers. However, this is a categorical mistake in that an overhear is a person who listens to what a speaker say without the speaker’s knowledge of it. Thus, a speech cannot be addressed to the overhearer. But media audiences, unlike overhearers, are

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who may listens to an answer without respondent’s knowledge of it. Even to the media audiences to whom survey answers may be communicated, the respondent totally remains in statistical anonymity.

  1 2 3

4 5 6

I:  Do you agree or disagree that sharing or merging key municipal services such  as fire or police can significantly reduce property taxes?  R: I agree  I: Do you agree or disagree that sharing or merging key municipal services such  as fire or police would lead to a significant reduction in the quality of those  services?  R: I disagree  I: Which do you think would produce a bigger savings in property taxes –  consolidating towns or consolidating school districts?  R: probably consolidating town   

  This transcript lucidly shows the nature of the participant role played by survey respondents. As noted, first, the interactions between interviewer and respondent are only composed of two turns as a combined unit (question and answer), and there is no confirmation of one’s understanding of other’s perspective. Because an interviewer is not the person with whom the respondent expects or hopes to share a view, the respondent does not question whether the interviewer understands respondent’s views. Second, what the respondent utters in the lines 2, 4 and 6 (‘agree,’ ‘disagree,’ ‘consolidating town’) is the exact reiteration of a part of questions. To a survey respondent, a survey interview is like taking a school exam in which a student chooses an answer without an intention of communication. That is, unable to expect that his answers

those who one’s speech is directed in their immediate absence, and when one engages in a journalistic interview, he expects that he is recognized as the author of his speech by media audiences (Scannell, 1996).

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are recognized as authored by him and responded by other people, what a respondent can do is just to choose one of the options provided by the interviewer and verbally express his choice by repeating the same words phrased in the questions.

Monological Talk 

Indeed, the most outstanding feature of survey interviews is the monological relationship between interviewers and respondents. On the one hand, interviewers are an animator of pollsters who do not speak for themselves but merely recite questions whose intended meanings even they may not know and may be not interested in. On the other hand, respondents as a statistical unit replaceable for another one simply choose one of the options without expecting any conversational exchanges and shared understanding with the interviewer. As Dillon (1990: p.110) succinctly puts it, ‘neither the question nor the answer serves the interest of either the interviewer or the respondent. They are [marked] strangers asking and answering questions for some unknown purpose on behalf of some unknown party.’

3.3.2. Asymmetrically Administered Talk  In survey interviews, not only does an interviewer serve as the animator of the questionnaire and recorder of answers but also as an administrator of the overall process of interviews on behalf of pollsters. Ideally, the functions as the animator of questions and recorder of answers can be mechanized and performed solely by technological devices. Interactive voice response (IVR) systems, as many online business sectors

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nowadays utilize for telebanking and customer services, can be applied to opinion polls. Automated response systems (ARS) offer prerecorded questions to respondents and record responses by means of dial tones. Internet polls are another instance of such technology-based opinion polls wherein computer programs substitute for human interviewers. Although the ideal interview is a standardized communication performed as prescripted by a protocol, polls based on these interactive technologies, however, are not generally accepted as the standard practice of opinion polling, because machines can hardly manage or control the less programmable behaviors of respondents. In so called ‘self-administered’ polls, administration of the overall process of answering rests on respondents’ discretion. First, machines cannot eliminate the ‘self-selection bias,’ the hallmark of unscientific straw polls. Pollsters had already discovered the technical disadvantages of mail surveys from the early moment of scientific opinion polls (Gallup & Rae, 1940). In mail surveys, participation in surveys is exclusively dependent upon respondents’ choice. That is, pollsters cannot ensure that the returned mail surveys represent a cross-section they intend to describe, since the respondents who chose to return the surveys could be systematically different from those who chose not to return them. Second, in self-administered polls, pollsters cannot distinguish who actually answers the questions. Respondents’ consultation with other non-respondents (e.g., collaboration between husband and wife) before answering the given questions can

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impair the statistical randomization (Sudman & Bradburn, 1982).29 Third, selfadministered polls are vulnerable to the ‘question-order effect,’ if respondents do not follow the temporal order of the questionnaire as prescripted by pollsters. Respondents may look over the entire questionnaire in advance, skip instructions, and give an answer first to easier questions to figure out (Sudman & Bradburn, 1982). Thus, manuals of standard opinion polls recommend employing human interviewers interacting with respondents either via telephone (Bourque & Fielder, 2003) or in person (Oishi, 2003) rather than resting on blind technological interfaces in order to make sure that respondents are singularized and behave in accordance with the sequences precisely as predetermined by pollsters.

Preference Organization of Survey Interviews 

The sequence organization of standard survey interviews consists of multiple adjacency pairs of questions and answers. In the first turn, interviewers deliver questions according to the temporal order designed by pollsters, and in the second turn, respondents give an answer. In the third turn, interviewers accept the answer by recording with or without a confirmation of answers or an acknowledgement of acceptance.

[Sequence Type 1] Interviewer asks a question. Respondent gives an answer. Interviewer accepts the answer with/without a confirmation

29

I will argue in the last chapter that this type of collaboration between respondents and non-respondents is not only necessary but also beneficial in the pre-announced public opinion polling that I suggest.

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1 2

1

2 3

I:  Do you agree or disagree that sharing or merging key municipal services such  as fire or police can significantly reduce property taxes?  R: I agree           ((interviewer’s typing)) 

I:  In order to avoid service cuts or keep property taxes from increasing, how  willing would you be to have your town share services such as fire or police  with a neighboring town: very willing: somewhat willing: not too willing: or not  at all willing?  R: somewhat  I:  somewhat?         ((interviewer’s typing)) 

These sequences, ostensibly simple enough, display an ideal structural organization preferred or judged legitimate by pollsters. Here, ‘preferred’ does not refer to a psychological preference (feeling of likes or dislikes) but an ideal-typical expectation about the second part vis-à-vis the first part of the adjacency pair: e.g., a question paired with an answer, a request or offer with an acceptance, an assessment with an agreement (Levinson, 1983). That is, the preference organization in survey interviews is the pairing of a question and a relevant answer without irrelevant or interruptive elements. As the sequences above show, on the one hand, the answers in the second part of the adjacency pair are an exact reiteration of a choice option offered in the first part. On the other hand, the answers in the second part do not contain any morphologically ‘marked’ elements (Levinson, 1983) such as pauses before delivering an answer, uncertainty qualifiers (e.g., ‘I am not sure but...’), irregular hesitations (e.g., ‘uhh,’ ‘thuh..’)30 or requests for clarification (e.g., ‘pardon?,’ ‘I don’t get it’).

30

Linguistically inexplicit elements like pauses and hesitations are not merely a peripheral element subordinate to linguistically explicit speeches. Sometimes, those elements autonomously perform an

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The distinctive features of standard survey interviews wherein a human interviewer is interpersonally present are comparatively well-exhibited when it comes to ‘dispreferred’ or illegitimate answers which do not conform to the questionnaire prescripted by pollsters (e.g., silences, hesitations, irrelevant answers, question-probing answers etc). An interviewer swiftly transitions to the next sequence upon receiving a legitimate answer. In contrast, she must manage respondent’ behaviors, when she receives an illegitimate answer. Illegitimate answers, hence, generate more complex and longer sequences than the ideal-typical sequence consisting of question-answerconfirmation, since they tend to create insertion sequences between question and answer with respect to the given answer or question.

[Sequence Type 2] Interviewer asks a question. {Insertion sequences} Respondent gives a (final) answer. Interviewer accepts the answer with or without a confirmation

1 2 3 4

I: Do you think the amount of debt the state has right now is a major problem,  minor problem, or not really a problem?  R: yes, I think it’s a problem  I:  would do you say a major problem or minor problem?  R: it is a major problem                                                   ((interviewer’s typing)) 

      In this example, lines 2 and 3 are insertion sequences that are embedded between the adjacency pair of question (line 1) and answer (line 4). We can see here that the first expression. For example, courteous rejections of requests are normally performed by these inexplicit elements.

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answer in line 2 is regarded as an illegitimate one, because the answer does not fully reiterate the offered choice options as well as including a marked element, ‘yes,’ presumably irrelevant to the type of question delivering multiple choices. An important point that must be unfailingly grasped is that the place where preference organization is judged is always the second turn taken by the respondent. In other words, the first and second parts in an adjacency pair do not share equal standings. Once a question is delivered, the interviewer’s administrative decision as to whether to terminate a sequence there and transit to another one [Sequence 1], or proceed towards an insertion sequence before getting a final answer [Sequence 2] essentially depends on the nature of an answer in the second turn. The next two sections examine in detail the latter cases in which an illegitimate answer generates insertion sequences. Especially, these sections pay attention to the insertion sequences relating to ‘probing’ or what conversation analysts call ‘repair’ (Schegloff, Jefferson & Sacks, 1974). The probing insertion sequences can be initiated either by an interviewer concerning an answer or a respondent concerning the question.

Interviewer‐Initiated Probing 

One of the main tasks of interviewers is recording answers that conform to the formats predetermined by pollsters. In doing so, interviewers do not neutrally record answers delivered by respondents. When one focuses solely on the [Sequence 1] in which preferred answers are given, interviewers seemingly appear to be a neutral recorder of responses. However, what [Sequence 1] does not clearly disclose is how interviewers

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compulsorily impose the pre-scripted formats, because the respondent appears to be voluntarily adhering to the formats. The compulsory imposition is more unambiguously intelligible in [Sequence 2]. The following three sequences demonstrate how interviewers impose the formats, when an illegitimate answer is given.

1

2 3 4 5 6

I:  In order to avoid service cuts or keep property taxes from increasing, how  willing would you be to have your town share services such as fire or police  with a neighboring town: very willing?: somewhat willing: not too willing?: or  not at all willing.  R: I’ll be willing  I:  very willing?   R:                  [yeah  I:                    some‐what] willing? not too willing? or not at all.  R: very willing         ((interviewer’s typing))   

 

  The first two sequences show the imposition of the prescripted formats in a closed question. In this example, the respondent’s first answer (line 2) is a partial reiteration of the choice options. When the interviewer offers four choices – ‘very willing, somewhat willing, not too willing, not at all willing,’ the respondent just says ‘I’ll be willing.’ Encountering such an illegitimate answer that does not exactly match one of the options, the interviewer initiates a probe question by repeating the same four choices. At the very moment when the interviewer read again the first choice – ‘very willing’ (line 3), the respondent immediately says ‘yeah’ (line 4) indirectly indicating that he is ‘very willing.’ Even though the respondent confirms his answer by ‘yeah,’ the interviewer does not accept the answer and continue to deliver other choices (line 5). It is not until the respondent phonetically reiterates the sound ‘very willing’ in full that the interviewer 80

accepts the answer (line 6).

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7

I: Do you agree or disagree that sharing or merging key municipal services such  as fire or police can significantly reduce property taxes.  R: by merging [them?   I:                         yes] sharing or merging key municipal services  R:  yeah: probably could  I:   would you say agree or disagree?  R:  agree  I:   agree?           ((interviewer’s typing))   

  In the second example, the respondent delivers a hesitating utterance ‘by merging them?’ (line 2) instead of giving an answer probably to have a time for thinking about the question. Here, it is notable that the respondent’s first utterance is an abbreviation of the full question; ‘sharing or merging’ in the question is shortened as ‘merging’ and ‘key municipal services’ is indicated as ‘them.’ Upon hearing these modifications, the interviewer immediately corrects the respondent’s first utterance with an original phrase as delivered in the question (line 3). Then, the respondent gives a positive answer by saying ‘yeah probably could’ (line 4), which contains uncertainty qualifiers (‘probably’ and ‘could’). Again upon receiving another type of illegitimate answer, the interviewer initiates a probe simultaneously forcing a choice between ‘agree’ and ‘disagree’ (line 5), and accepts only the answer reiterating one of the forced choices (line 6 and 7). An additional interesting point in this sequence concerns the format of question. The use of a question delivery component ‘do you agree or disagree’ is a rarity in ordinary conversation for the evaluation of factuality (Crespi, 1997), because the primary object of evaluation in the ‘agree/disagree’ question type is the validity of the statement 81

(i.e., proposal or assertion) that other persons said, not the content enclosed in the statement. For instance, in ordinary conversation, one normally asks ‘would there be another life after death?’ or ‘do you think there is another life after death?’ rather than ‘do you agree or disagree that there is another life after death?.’ That is, unless the enclosed statement is associated with a third personal author (e.g., “Do you agree or disagree with Jason that there is another life after death?”), the use of the ‘agree/disagree’ question type sounds strange. In contrast, frequently using the ‘agree/disagree’ type, survey questionnaires omit or impersonalize the author of the statement as in the case of the question above (line 1). Receiving the ‘agree/disagree’ question, the respondent might have privately rephrased the question as the ‘do you think ~’ type which is more familiar in ordinary conversation and, hence, answers ‘yeah probably could’ (line 4). However, the interviewer rejects the conversational answer and imposes unfamiliar answers and makes the respondent explicitly reiterate one of them.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

I: For this question, I’m just looking for a guess off the top of your head.  How  much debt does the state have right now in dollars?  R: (3 sec) billions  I: I’m just looking for a guess off the top of your head?  R: I’m sorry?  I:                    oh, how much in billions?  R:                                                                billions? how mu‐ch?  I:   right, yes ma’am  R:  oh, boy, I have no idea, honey. I’m just guessing, you know? :: I don’t  know what you wanna me to say. Hmm ha ha ((laughs))  I:  would that be like ten billion? fifty billion?    R: hmmm I guess about ten billion    ((interviewer’s typing))   

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The third example is the sequence starting with an open-ended question. The myth concerning open-ended questions is that respondents are allowed to give an answer freely as whatever they want, because no predetermined choice options are given to the respondents (Houtkoop-Steenstra, 2000). However, the truth is that interviewers induce recordable answers even about an open-ended question, and sometimes, suggest specific choices. In this particular sequence, to an open-ended question requesting an estimation of state debt (line 1), the respondent provides an estimating answer, ‘billions,’ (line 2) after a three-second silence. The interviewer here does not accept the answer as given by the respondent, even though the question is open-ended. Instead, the interviewer reads again a part of the question signaling that the given answer is not a preferred one (line 3) and starts a probe question requesting the respondent to specify the amount (line 5). Upon the request for specification, the respondent frankly confesses the impossibility of giving a true answer, in part because she has no idea about the amount, and in part because she does not know what the interviewer wants to get (line 8). A laugh that seems to express bewilderment or embarrassment follows the confession. The interviewer who needs a recordable answer makes no response with regard to respondent’s acknowledgment that she has no answerable opinion. The interviewer simply disregards what the respondent said in the immediately precedent turn, and, instead, skips back to the first answer in the line 2, as if the respondent has an answer. Then, the interviewer asks the respondent to answer with specific numbers in the same manner that the interviewer exemplifies – ‘would that be like ten billion or fifty billion’ (line 9). Now, compelled to give an answer, the respondent iterates one of those examples, and the interviewer accepts it (line 10). It

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should be here stressed that the answer (‘ten billion’) is not the respondent’s own estimation but one of the random choices offered by the interviewer as (if) in the closed question; namely, even the answer to an open-ended question is constrained by interviewers’ formatting. To sum, (1) upon receiving an illegitimate answer, interviewers as an interpersonal administrator channel respondents to give an answer that is amenable to the format as prescripted by pollsters. (2) Illegitimate answers include a partial reiteration of choices, unspecified answers, shortened answers (e.g., ‘yeah’), and answers to questions privately modified by respondents in their everyday local terms. (3) The probing question initiated by interviewers is just a repeated delivery of a part of the question. (4) Interviewers force respondents to make the utterance of an answer the phonetic reiteration of one of the offered choices at full length. (5) The enforcement of formatting of answers is applied to an open-ended question not to mention a closed question.

Respondent‐Initiated Probing 

A special class of illegitimate interaction is interviewers’ unstandardized responses to a probing question initiated by respondents. Regarding respondent-initiated probes, standard survey manuals consistently instruct not to engage in respondents’ probing questions. For example, Interviewer’s Manual used at the Institute for Social Research in the University of Michigan (1978, p.15) instructs interviewers just to ‘repeat the question’ ‘when the respondent does not seem to understand the question, when he misinterprets it, when he seems unable to make up his mind, or when he strays from the 84

subject.’ More recent manuals (e.g., Oishi, 2003) recommend using ‘neutral statements’ such as ‘whatever is meant to you’ in addition to the classic option of repeating questions.

1

2 3 4 5 6 7

I: I’m going to read you a number of proposals included in the budget plan.   Please tell me whether you approve or disapprove of ea‐ch? Reducing the state  work force by 3,000 employees, mainly through an early retirement pro‐gram.  Please tell whether you appro‐ve or disappro‐ve of the above proposal.  R: Ahm sorry can you read that again?  I:        sure  I: reducing the state work force by 3,000 employ ‐ees, mainly through an  early retirement pro‐gram                                ((slower reading))  R: state employees? as in government officers?  I: it says uh reducing state work force by 3,000 employees.  R: ah disapprove      

This sequence shows the case of classic repertoire of repeating the question. When the respondent asks the interviewer to reread the question (line 2), the interviewer repeats part of the question at a slower pace (line 4). Compare this entirely legitimate practice with the next one. In line 5, the respondent asks another question if ‘state employees’ means someone like ‘government officers.’ The interviewer avoids giving an answer or confirmation about the respondent-initiated probing question. Instead, she opts to repair the phrase of ‘state employees’ in respondent’s question as ‘state work force,’ a phrase in the interviewer’s original question (line 6). In order to exempt herself from dialogic responsibility for the respondent’s question, the interviewer also attaches an excuse device, ‘it says,’ (‘the questionnaire says’), which implies that a misunderstanding was caused by respondent’s failure to follow correctly what the interviewer had delivered in asking the question. In doing so, the interviewer unjustly transposes a phonemic or

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meaning-related problem posed by the respondent into a phonetic or physically soundrelated problem. Receiving this irrelevant response from the interviewer, the respondent feels obliged to give an answer, ‘ah disapprove.’ Does it mean that the answer given by the respondent is what she truly wants to give? How can one answer a question without a modicum of assurance that she has understood the question correctly? The next two sequences show vivid consequences of interviewers’ deafness to respondents’ probing questions. One is concerned with the practice of repeating questions, and the other with delivering neutral statements.

1 2 3 4

I:   Which municipality do you live in?  R:  (3 sec) meaning what? I don’t understand. ***** county?  I:   which municipality do you live in?  R:   I’m not sure honey?      ((interviewer’s typing))   

The question is about the geographical information of the respondent’s residence. Regarding the question eliciting the information in terms of ‘municipality,’ the respondent seems unfamiliar with the word ‘municipality.’ After a three-second silence, the respondent asks the meaning of the question and probes whether the term, ‘municipality,’ can be answered in terms of ‘county’ with which she might be more familiar (line 2). In the next turn, the interviewer neither offers an account for the word ‘municipality,’ nor translates it into more locally familiar terms like ‘township,’ ‘city,’ or ‘borough.’ The interviewer merely repeats the original question (line 3). Since the respondent failed to get a cooperative response from interviewer, there remains no way to

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cooperate further with the interviewer but for notifying her that “I’m not sure honey” (line 4).

  1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

I:   I’m going to read you a number of proposals included in the budget plan.   Please tell me whether you approve or disapprove of ea‐ch?  Reducing the  amount of property tax rebate checks for those who earn between $100,000  and $150,000. Please tell me if you approve or disapprove the proposal?  R:   ::: I am sorry ma’am ::: what :: [what is it?  I:                                  I’m sorry?]  R:  what ::: what is it?  I:   It’s just to get people’s opinion around the state about these topics?   R:   I have no :: I have no :: comments  I:    I’ll go right about answers. Your opinion is just as important as anyone  else’s, sir?  R:   ah ahy I appreciate that :: what I’m just saying is I haven’t followed you. :::  that caused what I’m doing. That is why I can’t offer [any   ((murmuring))  I:                                                                                               O‐kay] sir?       ((closes))   

In this sequence, the interviewer uses a different strategy; rather than mechanically repeating the same question, she delivers a’ neutral’ statement blindly prescripted by pollsters. After hearing a relatively lengthy question that the respondent couldn’t follow so well (line 8), he twice requests a clarification of the question by uttering ‘what is it?’ (line 2 and 4). To the respondent’s probes, interviewer recites a prescripted statement “it’s just to get people’s opinion around the state about these topics,” as if the respondent had asked a question about the purpose of the survey interview. Unexpectedly receiving an answer that has nothing to do with his question, the respondent says that he has nothing to comment (line 6). In return, the interviewer reads another prescripted statement, ‘your opinion is just as important as anyone else’s,’ a strategic statement recommended to encourage respondents when they refuse to answer 87

(Oishi, 2003). Encountering another irrelevant answer from the interviewer, the respondent specifies that his previous answer of no comments in line 6 was due to the fact that he ‘haven’t followed’ the interviewer (line 8). Rather than reading the question again upon his explanation, the interviewer closes the sequence by saying ‘okay’ (line 9), presumably a confirmation of no opinion, immediately after she heard the respondent saying “I can’t offer any.” According to Harvey Sacks (1992b), the general rule of organizing a conversational interaction is the ‘recipient design’ in which a speaker builds an utterance in such a way that it fits a specific recipient. Speakers are expected to orient the topic toward their knowledge of the recipient’s knowledge or interest. Speakers are also expected to use vocabularies understandable by the recipient. As Krippendorff (2009b, p.137) puts it, in dialogue ‘everything said is said in the expectation of being understood by an addressee.’ Institutional talk in interaction, however, generally diverges from the norm of recipient design. For instance, professionals are known for using Latin-rooted jargons (e.g., medical jargons such as ‘pneumonia,’ ‘cardiovascular’ disease and ‘gynecology’) whose sounds may be familiar to lay people, but whose meanings are inaccessible to them. Acronyms (e.g., ‘ENIGMA’), which really remain an inscrutable enigma to the outsiders of the field, until the capitalized words are fully phrased (‘Engine for the Neutralization of Information by Generation of Miasmic Alphabets’), are also a feature of institutional talk in which the boundary of recipients is severely limited. Survey interviews, of course, significantly differ from such kinds of institutional talk, because interviewers manage a talk on behalf of the absent third-parties, namely,

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pollsters. As such, interviewers are not allowed to answer to the probing questions. Instead, they are instructed to (1) mechanically reread the question against respondents’ request for alternative articulations of the unfamiliar terms used in the survey questions, or (2) deliver a prescripted statement, when respondents cannot follow the question. Moreover, (3) interviewers transpose a semantic problem raised by the respondents into a phonetic or syntactic problem.

Asymmetry in Interaction 

Although participants in survey interviews are indifferent to each other, and thereby their speeches are monological, there exist interactions directed to each participant to some extent. Those interactions, however, are not reciprocally or cooperatively controlled ones. On the contrary, the interactions are subordinate to the administrative purposes of pollsters, an absent third party. As deputy administrators, interviewers seek to asymmetrically manage the behaviors of respondents by reading questions in accordance with the temporal orders designed by pollsters, by imposing formatted probing questions on the illegitimate answers given by respondents, and by forcing respondents to reiterate the same phonetic elements delivered in the question. In contrast, interviewers are deaf to respondents’ probing questions. They merely reread questions or recite a prescripted statement by transposing semantic issues into phonetic issues. Asymmetry in interaction, however, does not necessarily mean that interviewers exert an administrative power over respondents, as found in the institutional talk of, say, police investigations. On the contrary, respondents may have a sense that they exert a

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‘civil power’ (Alexander, 2006) by participating in an interview. Rather, the point is that the asymmetry in interaction may make respondents feel frustrated.

3.4. IMPROVISATION OF ANSWERS IN SURVEY INTERVIEWS As a measuring instrument, public opinion polling presupposes that respondents have an opinion prior to being asked through survey interviews. In other words, the opinions offered in response to survey questions should have been what is already formed, discussed or developed in ordinary conversation or what is at least heard of and part of vocabularies of everyday conversation, even if the survey questions had not come up. If the answers called for by interviewers are radically different from the opinions anchored in ordinary conversation, or if the questions arise only during survey interviews, the claim that opinion polling records and summarizes preexisting opinions becomes unsustainable under these circumstances, because poll data are not generalizable to the conversation that occurs outside the survey interviews. Since the 1950s, pollsters and cognitive psychologists31 have recognized the problem and made strenuous efforts to investigate how respondents give an answer during survey interviews. At first, the issue was centered on non-coincidence between ‘attitude’ and ‘opinion.’ When opinion polling was at the fledgling stage, Thurstone in his seminal article (1928) argued that ‘attitudes’ defined as ‘the sum total of a man’s 31

Public opinion polling has established a symbiotic relationship with psychology since its inception. The early pioneers of opinion polling and academic public opinion research – including George Gallup, Paul Lazarsfeld, Floyd and Gordon Allport, Hadley Cantril, Herbert Hyman, Daniel Katz, Rensis Lickert, and Charles Osgood -- were all trained in social psychology and affiliated with institutions of psychological research (J. Converse, 1987).

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inclinations and feelings, prejudice or bias, preconceived notions, ideas, fears, threats, and convictions’ can be measured by observing ‘opinions’ which are asserted as ‘a verbal expression of attitudes.’ Namely, Thurstone’s bold formula was {Opinion = Attitude} where opinions verbalized during survey interviews are equated with unexpressed private attitudes. Thurstone’s formula underwent a significant revision in the wake of the ensuing two decades, and the revised formula established in the 1950s was {True Attitude = Opinion – Errors}. That is, opinion as an overt expression may not reveal attitude as a covert psychological state because of some internal or external perturbation factors (Wiebe, 1953). In this regard, Hadley Cantril’s Gauging Public Opinion (1944) and Herbert Hyman’s Interviewing in Social Research (1954) extensively compiled the cases in which, owing to interviewers’ obtrusive nature in survey interviews, the interviewers appear to function as a perturbation factor contributing to the error variances. Concerning what is formally dubbed the ‘interviewer effect,’ Hyman, followed by Sudman and Bradburn (1974) and Schuman and Presser (1981), described interviewers’ human traits (e.g., interviewers’ gender, race and languages) and behaviors (e.g., probing on their own discretion) as the source of errors that should be minimized, if not eliminated. On the basis of research on interviewer effect, Fowler and Mangione (1990) instruct that interviewers simply recite the questions as worded, probe for clarification and elaboration in a nondirective way, do not exercise interviewer’s own discretion, and communicate with a neutral stance. As previous sections demonstrated, these practices amount to shadow conversation in which interviewers are dialogically unengaged and functionally depersonalized by merely taking the role of ‘neutral’

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administrator, and an asymmetric interaction in which interviewers are technically privileged. By means of standardized survey interviews, pollsters claim that true attitudes can be revealed in respondent’s answers, because interviewers do not affect how respondents answer. Now, the following sections will analyze how the efforts to minimize so-called ‘interviewer effect’ recursively play in the ways in which respondents give an answer.

3.4.1. Obliged Ad‐Hoc Answers  The standard model of survey response posits that a response is given through four steps – comprehension of the survey item, retrieval of relevant information stored in memory, making required judgment based on the retrieved information and selection of an answer (Tourangeau, Rips & Rasinski, 2000; Schwartz, 1995). On the one hand, built upon cognitive psychology, this model treats survey responses as monological mental events, as though respondents exist alone within the situation of survey interviews, by bracketing the institutional constraints exerted through interviewers. This model assumes that, in an ideal standard survey interviews, interviewer effects are absent, and thus interviewers can be theoretically considered non-present. On the other hand, this model presumes that respondents normally possess some knowledge or information existing prior to survey interviews, and retrieves them to make judgments on survey items. Therefore, according to this model, ‘no answer’ should be reported, when respondents do not have any information stored in memory to retrieve vis-à-vis survey questions. The following examples, however, rebut such presumptions showing how respondents feel

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obliged to give an answer and convert ‘no opinions’ into temporarily constructed ad-hoc answers in standard survey interviews.

1 2 3 4 5

I: Which do you think is a bigger problem for the state? growth in state debt or  growth in pensions and benefits for state workers.  R: you know what : I’m not knowledgeable enough to say  I:  that’s fine  R: I’m sorry  I:  that’s okay   

This sequence exemplifies the case in which reporting ‘no opinion’ would be seemingly justified and it is so recoded. Upon receiving the question, the respondent says that she has no sufficient knowledge to make a judgment on it (line 2), and the interviewer confirms ‘no opinion’ by saying ‘that’s fine’ (line 3). The sequence, however, does not stop there. In the next turn, the respondent apologies for the inability to give an answer (line 4). What this indicates is that the respondent feels obliged to give a recordable answer, because ‘no opinion’ is tacitly regarded as an illegitimate answer in survey interviews. Although no opinion is legitimately recorded in this case, the next sequences illustrate the opposite cases.

1

2 3 4 5 6

I: ((In order to create a dedicated fund for transportation projects, would you  favor or oppose the following]) Increasing the gas tax by 18 cents a gallon over  the next three years?  R: hmmm ::: (8 sec) 18 cents over the next three year?  I: yes, that’s increasing the gas tax 18 cents a gallon over the next three years.  R: I don’t know. Do I have to get an answer? I just feel ok.  I:  Would you like me to put favor or oppose?  R: ahhm, I just favor? :: oh wait I wanna oppose. 

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7 8

I:   oppose?  R:  yup   

In this example, the respondent suggests that she has never heard of the proposal to increase the gas tax, considering that she responds with a fairly long silence and initiates a probing question (line 2). After receiving a confirmation (line 3) for her probing question, the respondent says ‘I don’t know’ and asks if she must answer the question (line 4). At this point, she seems to feel obliged to give an answer, and, then, gives an uncertain answer, “I just feel ok,” to the question which she has never thought of. Upon receiving the uncertain answer which does not conform to the predetermined format, the interviewer probes whether the uncertain answer can be put as ‘favor or oppose’ (line 5). Faced with having to give a definite answer, respondent, at first, offers a hesitant answer with a rising tone (“I just favor?”) which indicates that she is still not sure about the pre-given uncertain answer (“I just feel ok”). Then, she immediately changes her mind and says “I wanna oppose” (line 6). The interviewer accepts the preferred answer (line 7) as if the respondent had heard of the issue and possessed a predetermined opinion about it.

1

2 3 4 5 6

I: How much have you heard about the governor’s plan to raise tolls about 50  percent every four years over the next 14 years in order to reduce state debt  and fund transportation projects: a lot, a little, or nothing at all?  R: how much I have heard?  I:  right  R:  no‐thing  I: Based on what you have read or heard do you favor or oppose this plan, or  do you have no opinion?  R: I have no opinion  94

7 8 9 10 11 12

I:  If you had to choose, as of right now, do you more favor or oppose the  idea?  R: uhh (4 sec) what is the question about :: to make sure the thing right  I: the governor’s plan to raise tolls about 50 percent every four years over the  next 14 years in order to reduce state debt   R: what was the question ?  I: If you had to choose right now do you favor or oppose the idea?  R: aye aye aye uhh:: oppose        

While the antecedent example showed how a tentatively constructed answer was tacitly framed by interviewer’s formatting, this example shows how a tentative response was turned into an answer that would fulfill the respondents’ obligation to reply. In the first turn, the interviewer delivers a question as to how much respondent has heard of the governor’s plan. To this question, the respondent answers ‘nothing’ (line 4). Even though respondent said that he had heard nothing about the plan, the interviewer reads aloud a disjunctive question starting with “Based on what you have read or heard ~” (line 5), as if the respondent said that he had heard of the plan. Possibly because he had already answered that he had never heard about the plan, the respondent rephrases his answer as ‘I have no opinion’ (line 6). In the next turn, the interviewer reads the third sequel to the question asking ‘if you had to choose, as of right now ~’ (line 7), which implies that the respondent should now answer the question not on the basis of his prior knowledge but on what the interviewer told as a matter of fact. To this question, the respondent asks probes twice (line 8 and 9), and provides an ad hoc answer with marked linguistic components expressing uncertainties, ‘aye aye aye uhh’ (line 12). 1

I: For this question, I’m just looking for a guess off the top of your head.   How  much debt does the state have right now in dollars?  95

2 3 4 5 6

R: Oh, I have no idea.   I: I’m just looking for a guess off the top of your head?  R: ahm ::: (3 sec) a couple ::: I would say :: maybe :: how much is that? maybe  a billion?  I:  I’m sorry, you said one billion?  R: yeah   

Similarly, this sequence also shows a case in which the interviewer induces an improvised answer to an open-ended question. In the first turn, the interviewer delivers a question asking for a ‘guess off the top of your head’ and respondent says ‘I have no idea’ (line 2). Interviewer, however, does not accept the answer, and reads a request of answer (line 3). Upon this request, respondent utters a series of uncertainty hedges (‘ahm’ ‘I would say’ ‘maybe’ ‘how much is that?’) along with taking a silence, and gives an uncertain answer of ‘maybe a billion?’ with a rising intonation (line 4). Interviewer, then, trims off all of the uncertainty hedges, and asks whether respondent said ‘one billion’ (line 5), as if the respondent had given a definite answer.

3.4.2. Serial Ad‐Hoc Answers  We have so far explored the cases in which (1) respondents are obliged to give an ad-hoc answer to the question that they have never heard of or thought of, and in the process, (2) an uncertain answer is taken as definite. How about cases in which no insertion sequences arise, that is, cases in which respondents give an answer with neither probes nor uncertainty hedges? See the simple sequence below.

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1 2

I: Making state workers contribute mo‐re for their health benefits? ((Please tell me  whether you appro‐ve or disappro‐ve for the above proposal?))  R: disapprove   

In this example, the respondent ostensibly appears to offer a definite answer that jibes well with the standard model of survey responses, although the mental process of information retrieval and making a judgment cannot be directly observed. However, this is what artificially is severed from other sequences in which the constraints to give an answer are observable. Now, see the sequences in their entirety.

1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

I: Now, I’m going to read you some other proposals to reduce the state budget?   Please tell me whether you approve or disapprove of each.  Conducting an  independent audit of every state agency? Please tell me whether you appro‐ve  or disappro‐ve for the above proposal?  R:  gee, I’m not quite sure about that. Do I have to answer it?  I: We would like you to answer?  R: hmmm I guess disapprove  I: Reducing pensions for government workers? Please tell me whether you  appro‐ve or disappro‐ve for the above proposal?  R: hmmm, reducing payment for thuh :: oh my god: ok disapprove ha ha  ((laughs))  I: Raising the sales tax one percent?  R:                                                           I guess disapprove  I: Making state workers contribute mo‐re for their health benefits?  R:                                                                                                                 disapprove   

To the question asking about conducting an independent audit of every state agency, the respondent says that she is ‘not quite sure’ and asks whether she must answer the question (line 2). The interviewer takes this response as ‘refusal’ to answer rather than accept it as ‘no opinion,’ and reads aloud a prescripted neutral statement to press the 97

respondent to give an answer (line 3). Then, the respondent offers an ad hoc answer with uncertainty hedges, ‘hmmm I guess’ (line 4). The interviewer records it as a definite answer, and reads another question. Again, the respondent expresses uncertainties (‘hmmm,’ ‘oh my god’) and provides an answer, ‘ok disapprove’ (line 6). Line 6 needs more analyses. First, though the respondent has no opinion to offer with certainty, she gave up asking if she must answer as in the first sequence. That is, the respondent internally accepted the obligation to offer an answer, even though she was uncertain. Second, the laughs coming in tandem with the answer indicate the weirdness of the situation wherein the respondent is requested to answer the question about which she actually has no opinion. See here the next answer in line 8. The respondent’s answer becomes shortened including only one uncertainty marker (‘I guess disapprove’). The last answer in line 10 becomes even more shortened not involving a single uncertainty hedge, and it suggests that the last answer (‘disapprove’) which seems a definite answer might be actually a simplified repetition of previous answers (‘hmmm, I guess I disapprove,’ ‘oh my god, ok, I disapprove,’ ‘I guess I disapprove’) rather than an answer to the question. And, this is, in fact, the very sequence that was presented in the previous example in isolation. We can draw here three implications with respect to indeterminability of answers: (1) Obliged to give ad-hoc answers, respondents may provide answers that are serially associated. Given that all the answers offered in the sequences above were ‘disapprove’ (line 4, 6, 8, and 10), it is indeterminable whether those answers were truly directed toward the questions, or merely repetitions of previous answers. (2) The insertion

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sequence between interviewer and respondent amounts to a learning sequence in which the normal response by the respondent is not accepted as such and the respondent is ‘trained’ to give a definite answer. (3) More importantly, even the answers that seemingly look definite rather than uncertain can be, as a matter of fact, uncertain random answers from which uncertainty markers are only omitted.

  1 2 3

4 5 6

I:  Do you agree or disagree that sharing or merging key municipal services such  as fire or police can significantly reduce property taxes?  R: I agree  I: Do you agree or disagree that sharing or merging key municipal services such  as fire or police would lead to a significant reduction in the quality of those  services?  R: I disagree  I: Which do you think would produce a bigger savings in property taxes –  consolidating towns or consolidating school districts?  R: probably consolidating town   

  Namely, it is essentially indeterminable whether the answers (‘I agree,’ ‘I disagree,’ ‘probably consolidating town’) in the rather neat sequences above are the momentarily improvised ones completely endogenous to the situation of survey interviews, or are generalizable to ordinary situations outside the interviews.32

3.4.3. Answers of ‘No Opinion’   While interviewers force respondents to offer ad-hoc answers to the questions that respondents have never thought of or heard of, they also make respondents unable to give 32

The indeterminability in part stems from the inherent shortcoming of conversation analysis as a way of analyzing institutional talk in interaction from the standpoint of distant overhearers rather than direct participants (Krippendorff, 2009b). The same kind of shortcoming is also shared by pollsters who do not directly engage in survey interviews as participants.

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an answer. As I already analyzed in detail in the section dealing with respondent-initiated probing, answers of ‘no opinion’ are sometimes incurred by interviewers’ rereading of the question or delivering prescripted neutral statements regarding the respondentinitiated probes.

  1 2 3 4

I:   Do you agr‐ee or disagr‐ee the state budget is currently in a serious fiscal  crisis?  R:  I didn’t know thuh ::: state budget was in the crisis?  I:   it’s just to know do you agr‐ee or disagree the state budget is currently in a  serious fiscal crisis  R:   no comment   

  In this sequence, the respondent initiates a probe question asking if ‘state budget was in the crisis’ (line 2). To this question, the interviewer avoids directly responding: she does not provide any information about who said so, or what is the condition of state budget. Instead, she repeats the original question with an attachment of ‘it’s just to know~’ (line 3). Because the respondent has received no relevant information, he has no choice but to say ‘no comment’ (line 4).

  1

2 3 4 5 6 7

I:   I’m going to read you a number of proposals included in the budget plan.   Please tell me whether you approve or disapprove of ea‐ch?  Reducing the  amount of property tax rebate checks for those who earn between $100,000  and $150,000. Please tell me if you approve or disapprove the proposal?  R:   ::: I am sorry ma’am ::: what :: [what is it?  I:                                  I’m sorry?]  R:  what ::: what is it?  I:   It’s just to get people’s opinion around the state about these topics?   R:   I have no :: I have no :: comments  I:    I’ll go right about answers. Your opinion is just as important as anyone  else’s, sir?  100

8 9

R:   ah ahy I appreciate that :: what I’m just saying is I haven’t followed you. :::  that caused what I’m doing. That is why I can’t offer [any   ((murmuring))  I:                                                                                               O‐kay] sir?       ((closes))   

  This example is the one recycled from section 3.3.2. The respondent here could not follow the lengthy question and asks what the question was (line 2, 4). To this, the interviewer reads aloud a prescripted statement that is irrelevant to the respondent’s question (line 5, 7). Even though respondent explains the reason that he cannot give an answer (line 8), the interviewer takes it as ‘no opinion’ instead of rearticulating the question (line 9).       3.5. DISCUSSION As discussed in section 3.1, the survey interview as a new speech genre was devised to realize an egalitarian ideal that the voice of every citizen should have an equal chance to be represented with equal importance. In contrast to the Kantian model of public opinion, in which the privileged segments have a greater chance to address their opinions to the public, the survey interview in its inception (Gallup & Rae, 1940) was intended to provide an equal opportunity for opinions developed in ordinary conversation to be publicly audible, which otherwise would remain in silence. Despite pollsters’ intention to make ordinary conversations publicly hearable, a conversation analysis of survey interviews has demonstrated the extraordinariness of survey interviews as a communication genre by which ordinary conversation cannot be easily translated.

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First, in survey interviews as institutional talk, the interaction between interviewers and respondents is devoid of dialogical properties (i.e., embodied authorship and addressivity). Interviewers as an animator of prescripted questionnaire mechanically recite questions rather than ask questions as a conversant, and respondents give an answer directed towards none. Second, the relationship between interviewers and respondents is asymmetric: Interviewers are interested in getting only the answers that fit into the questionnaire format, and provide preformatted statements to the respondents’ probing questions, which, being largely irrelevant to the respondents’ probes, are of little help. Third, feeling obliged to answer survey questions, respondents tend to provide improvised answers even to the questions that they have never heard of or thought of. In this process, interviewers sometimes try to press respondents to come up with a recordable answer, and sometimes make respondents unable to answer by providing irrelevant statements to respondents’ probes. One may here contend that the examples provided in this chapter, especially those relating to the momentary improvisation of opinions, are rare extreme cases that do not justly represent good survey interviews conducted by prestigious polling institutions, and that such marginal cases would not significantly affect the overall final results, because, once aggregated, random answers may cancel out each other. Indeed, for the sake of generalization, my arguments are subject to further in-depth investigations on the survey interviews, and that requires openness of national-scale survey institutions regarding survey interview processes. Apart from acknowledging the need for further in-depth

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investigations, I provide counterarguments that those arguments are indirectly confirmed by survey research surrounding the issue of ‘non-attitudes.’ In the first place, Philip Converse in his seminal article (1964) notes that the lower strata of the American public or ‘mass publics’ as opposed to the political elites showed only vague understandings of political ideologies (conservatism vs. liberalism) and little consistency over various issues to the extent that the statistical technique of factor analysis was meaningless to use. Furthermore, Converse (1970) maintains that as much as 80 percent of survey respondents have ‘no real attitudes’ and give random answers just feeling ‘obliged to try a response’ (p.175). In a similar vein, Bishop (2005) reports that about 30-40 percent of survey respondents give a ‘pseudo-opinion’ to a totally fictional issue concocted by survey researchers and even answer that they have thought of the issue before the survey interview. Moore (2008), formerly senior editor of the Gallup Poll, warns that surveyed opinion can be, at best, read as an uncertain ‘permissive’ opinion (e.g., The US may wage a war against Iraq) rather than as a ‘directive’ one (e.g., I want the US to go to a war with Iraq). Regarding the ‘non-attitudes,’ ‘pseudo-opinions,’ ‘instability,’ and ‘uncertainty’ of surveyed opinions, survey researchers have focused on the role played by differing levels of political knowledge among respondents. In a comprehensive study of political knowledge among American citizens, Delli-Carpini and Keeter (1996) show that political knowledge is a strong predictor of ‘opinion holding’ – the probability of choosing an answer instead of choosing ‘don’t know’ or ‘no opinion’ – and ‘opinion stability’ over time. On the basis of these observations, Althaus (2003) raises a possibility that opinion

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polling may undermine its principal premise or promise of the unbiased political representation: that is to say, opinion polling may over-represent the voice of those who are well informed of politics, because random answers of the ill-informed are cancelled out in the process of statistical aggregation, whereas the answers of the well-informed remain relatively more stable. Whereas it has become fashionable these days to attribute random answers and no opinions mainly to public ignorance, a conversation analysis of survey interviews in this chapter suggests that, to use the statistical terminologies familiar to pollsters, the effects of political knowledge can be ‘confounded’ by the effects of survey interviews: standardized survey interviews, on the one hand, are less favorable to the less informed and, on the other hand, more conducive to random answers and no opinions. In other words, the standard model of survey interviews as an institutionally-structured ventriloquist talk is the main factor in discouraging, if not preventing, those who are underprivileged (less educated, women, racial minorities, seniors etc.) from speaking their minds in their own terms. As Berinsky (2004, p.26) puts it, ‘a don’t know response does not therefore indicate the lack of articulated political concerns or political thought, but rather the lack of political thought structured enough to easily form a summary evaluation in response to the survey question.’ Here, we need to see if there is a new ways in which survey interviews can be more dialogically conducted. Far from taking random answers and no opinion as inevitable, I suggest that survey interviews be repaired and redesigned in order to help the voice of ordinary people be publicly hearable, as George Gallup originally intended. First,

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we should examine the proposal (Suchman & Jordan, 1990) that survey interviews be reformed as a talk that resembles ordinary conversation. In the conversational survey interviews, the interviewer works not only as a representative of pollsters reading questions and recording answers but also as a dialogic participant who collaborates with respondents by helping them understand questions and develop opinions in the respondents' own terms. In this respect, Schober and Conrad (1997) report that, in an experimental study, ‘conversational interviewing’ led to 60 percent greater response accuracy than standardized survey interviews. Second, survey interviews should be publicly recognized. Currently, survey interviews are privately conducted, and, thus, respondents do not have a sense that they are speaking on behalf of other people, and that they are addressing a speech to other people. That is, respondents feel little responsibility for answering survey questions, and a public recognition of survey interviews may make respondents feel more accountable for their participation in an interview. Third, survey responses should have a ‘double dialogicality’ (Linell, 2009). That is, respondents’ answers provided in survey interviews must be linked to the wider political controversies occurring outside survey interviews. When one says ‘agree’ or ‘disagree’ to a question, on the one hand, the answer must be what he would say in his personal or interpersonal communicative contexts, and, on the other hand, the questions must be shareable by others who are not sampled as respondents. This requires that the languages of survey questions be linked to the real political process, and, this requirement leads to questions about the nature of poll questions in Chapter 4.

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

4.1. THE SEMANTIC CONTENT OF PUBLIC OPINION The foregoing chapter demonstrated how survey interviews are institutionally constrained, and how survey answers are momentarily improvised in survey situations. Rather than tapping into ordinary conversation, survey interviews, controlled at a distance by pollsters and their prescripts, serve the information needs of pollsters. People’s voice in survey interviews is, by and large, a momentarily constructed opinion that amounts to highly simplified and predetermined binary formats like ‘agree/disagree,’ ‘favor/oppose’ or ‘approve/disapprove.’ This fact implies that what renders the voice to the people in opinion polling is not people’s language voluntarily uttered in ordinary conversations but pollsters’ language used in formulating questions. To take an example from Chapter 3, what people actually say is merely a reiteration of choice options (‘I agree,’ ‘I disagree,’ ‘probably consolidating town’) offered by pollsters, and those

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answers, in isolation, have little semantic values, until they are interpreted against specific poll questions.

I:  Do you agree or disagree that sharing or merging key municipal services such as  fire or police can significantly reduce property taxes?  R: I agree  I: Do you agree or disagree that sharing or merging key municipal services such as  fire or police would lead to a significant reduction in the quality of those services?  R: I disagree  I: Which do you think would produce a bigger savings in property taxes –  consolidating towns or consolidating school districts?  R: probably consolidating town   

As Splichal (1999, p.237) puts it, one of the substantial questions concerning public opinion polling is ‘who produces it and how it is produced.’ Accordingly, public opinion as published results from the questions drafted by the pollsters, not from what respondents talk about among themselves. To explicate, first, it is pollsters who determine the agenda of public opinion. Despite the fact that ordinary conversation is the natural communicative ecology of people’s voice, public opinion in opinion polling consists of respondents’ temporary reiterations of the choices that poll questions offer, and, thus, the semantic content of public opinion rests on poll questions rather than ordinary conversations. Second, it is pollsters who decide when public opinion is to be measured and published. Whereas people’s voice is ‘always present’ in the continuous stream of ordinary conversation, as Gallup and Rae (1940) posited, public opinion does not result from ordinary citizens’ intentions to say something about political matters. On the contrary, public opinion surfaces, only when pollsters ask questions mostly for their

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own interests in selling the poll data to their clients such as politicians, newspapers, advocacy groups and governmental departments. This chapter investigates the ways in which poll questions, which constitute the semantic content of public opinion are framed, and the time frames in which poll questions are asked. In so doing, this chapter briefly reviews various polling institutions (Gallup polls, presidential private polls, media polls, exit polls, academic polls) and points out that those institutions are oriented toward elections. Therefore, election frames play a key role in poll questions and what the public learns from the results. After the review, this chapter presents results of a content analysis of poll questions about the two issues – ‘same-sex marriage’ and ‘abortion,’ and discusses their implications.

4.2. ELECTION AND PUBLIC OPINION POLLING

 

4.2.1. ‘Permanent Election’: Lessons of the Gallup Poll  In their defining The Pulse of Democracy (1940), Gallup and Rae extensively

quote James Bryce’s The American Commonwealth (1895) to promote their belief that opinion polling embodies what Bryce called the ‘fourth-stage’ of public opinion. Bryce envisaged that ‘government by public opinion’ would become more complete, when the will of the majority of citizens was continuously ascertainable independently of elected representatives; to paraphrase, when the voice of people could be heard without recourse

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to the repertoire of delegation which takes place only at certain intervals during election periods.

A fourth stage would be reached, if the will of the majority of the citizens were to become ascertainable at all times, and without the need of its passing through a body of representatives, possibly even without the need of voting machinery at all. In such a state of things the sway of public opinion would have become more complete (Bryce, 1895. p.919).

The vision of Bryce was the invention of ‘machinery’ that would enable ‘measuring the popular will from week to week or month to month’ to ‘look incessantly for manifestations of current popular opinion, and to shape their [representatives] course in accordance with their reading of those manifestations’ (ibid). Following Bryce, Gallup and Rae (1940) also note several shortcomings of the electoral delegation model of public opinion. First, the delegation model does not necessarily ensure an identity between representatives and electorates. The mandate theory of political representation assumes representatives to mirror the electorates. However, the actual composition of representatives tends to bear little resemblance to the composition of the population in terms of demography. Moreover, as Edmund Burke commented critically on the idea of popular government, the elected delegates are not necessarily speaking as the ‘ambassadors’ representing the parochial interests of their electorates (cf. Pitkin, 1967). Rather, they should speak for the people at large representing the interest of the whole nation. Eventually, Gallup and Rae took issue with the Burkean concept of political representation, levying the criticism that claiming to

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speak for the people in delegation may actually ‘prevent the people themselves from being heard’ (p.17). Second, Gallup and Rae saw that voting ballots cast in elections scarcely serve as the index of public opinion. Because in elections voting ballots are cast for a candidate with little reference to public issues, they claimed that it is difficult to ‘separate issues from men’ (p.19). Favoring one candidate over another does not mean that the voters endorse all policy proposals made by the elected politician. Although an elected politician is tempted to regard his election as ‘a blanket endorsement of his entire program’ (p.18), punching a name printed on a ballot does not serve to communicate voters’ opinions on specific policy programs but merely to express preference on a candidate. Third, since elections are periodically held at particular times, there is a need for keeping elected representatives in ‘constant touch with public opinion’ (p.21). Regardless of whether or not the representatives choose to follow public opinion, they should incessantly listen to what people are saying even after their election to offices. In this context, Gallup and Rae argued that public opinion polling is a machinery embodying the fourth stage of popular government in which public opinion can be heard independently of elections and political candidates. Thanks to polling, public opinion becomes constantly ascertainable even at non-election times, and its content, without being confined to the elections, can encompass a wide range of issues coming from the life world of ordinary citizens including those not directly linked to electing representatives. Despite Gallup’s innovative vision that public opinion must be heard

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beyond elections, however, the operation of public opinion polling has never been severed from or become independent of elections. On the contrary, public opinion polling has been subordinate to elections and elongated them further as the continuous events in the anticipation of the future elections. First and foremost, opinion polling has served as an instrument used to forecast the election outcomes. Since the inception of opinion polling, especially since the year of 1936, pre-election polls have become a routine practice among pollsters, and functioned as the paragon of scientific opinion polling. As is well known, in 1936, scientific pollsters including George Gallup, Elmo Roper and Archibald Crossley triumphed over straw polling conducted by The Literary Digest in more accurately predicting the winner of the presidential election (Herbst, 1993; Moore, 1995). Whereas, through the straw polls or ‘polls on the street,’ The Literary Digest, a magazine with a nationwide circulation, erroneously predicted Landon’s victory, the rising scientific pollsters could predict the landslide of Franklin Roosevelt with far smaller samples. Reflecting on the presidential election polling, Gallup and Rae prided themselves on the exactitude of scientific opinion polling:

Pre-election tests are important because they enable surveyors to put this new method of measuring public opinion through its most exacting test. From time to time sampling methods must be placed alongside the yardstick of an election, for the closeness of the estimates made by the polls to the actual count of local, state, or national elections is the best objective check on validity and accuracy (p.81).

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Indeed, an election is a rare, if not the only, opportunity that pollsters can test the accuracy of their polling measures. However, that does not mean that an election is the single most important event in which public opinion is expressed. As Gallup and Rae acknowledged, public opinion is constantly expressed in ordinary conversation, and pollsters can make the opinions generated in conversation publicly audible. Moreover, there are political crises such as the Civil Rights movement to which pollsters might have contributed to resolve the crises (see Lee, 2002 for details). Nevertheless, since its inception, the opinion polling enterprise has hinged on the accuracy in forecasting the outcomes of the presidential election. The supremacy of the presidential election in opinion polling is pretty obvious: forecasting the election result with accuracy builds up pollsters’ credibility that makes the opinion poll data marketable. By asking “Which candidate do you think you will vote for in the presidential election?,” pollsters, in fact, want to sell the news of the outcomes of future events to their clients or sponsors – especially, politicians and journalists. Second, the preponderance of election-related questions in opinion polling has continued during the non-election years. As Crespi (1989, p.17) points out, ‘Gallup invented a number of questions that have become the bread and butter of political polling in the long periods between formal election campaigns.’ The central questions asked during the non-election years include ‘trial heat’ and ‘mock primaries’ of the forthcoming presidential, congressional or gubernatorial elections, party identifications and evaluations, and presidential popularity like job approval ratings.

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Gallup Poll Questions Asked during a Non-election Year (1959) [Vote Choice] If John Kennedy were the Democratic candidate and Nelson Rockefeller were  the Republican candidate, which would you like to see win the 1962 presidential  election? (If ‘Undecided,’ ask:) As of today, would you lean more to Kennedy,  the Democrat, or to Rockefeller, the Republican? (Gallup Poll: Nov. 1959)                 [Party Identification] In politics, as of today, do you consider yourself a Republican, Democrat or   Independent? (Gallup Poll: Nov. 1959)                [Presidential Popularity] Do you approve or disapprove of the way Eisenhower is handling his job as   President? (Gallup Poll: Dec. 1959)   

Third, aside from direct electoral or political issues, pollsters ask a battery of questions about social or moral issues such as the economy, health, race, the environment, women’s rights, crime, abortion and death penalty, but those questions are asked implicitly or explicitly in the context of questions relating to election outcomes, party support and politicians’ popularity. In that regard, the most persistent question is about the importance of social and moral issues in deciding for whom voters would cast a ballot or how much they support the incumbent public officials. As the following examples show, Gallup’ s American Institute of Public Opinion (AIPO) in an election year asks a question to identify what respondents see as ‘the most important problem,’ and then asks in the immediately following question which political party does a better job of handling the problem.

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[Issue Importance] What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?  Which political party do you think can do a better job of handling the problem  you have just mentioned (as the most important problem facing the country  today? (Gallup Poll: May, 1957)   

Moreover, during an election year (1960), AIPO asked a question by contextualizing social issues like ‘racial integration in the schools’ within the phrases relating to vote choices in the impending presidential election. Whereas this type of questions explicitly mentions the names of political parties and presidential candidates in their wording, pollsters assess the degree to which various social issues are connected to political preferences concerning support for president, electoral candidates and political parties by crosstabulating and/or correlating responses about issue positions and political preferences.

 

4.2.2. Predominance of Election Frames in Various Polls  In spite of Gallup, Crossley and Roper’s success in 1936, it is since the late 1960s

that opinion polling has proliferated and achieved institutional stability in American politics. While the founding fathers of opinion polling were successful in predicting the winner of the 1936 presidential election, they failed to accurately predict the outcome of the 1948 election between Thomas Dewey and Harry Truman by a large margin (Bradburn & Sudman, 1988). After that, many newspapers cancelled their subscription to the Gallup and Roper polls, and the polling industry was largely maintained by commercial surveys and ratings of media audiences rather than by political polling

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(Moore, 1995). The breakthrough amidst widespread distrust in public opinion polling came from pollsters’ institutional partnership with politicians (presidential polling) in the 1960s and with journalists (media polling) in the mid-1970s.

Presidential Polling 

Presidential polling refers to polls privately and often confidentially conducted by pollsters employed by presidential candidates. The earliest case of presidential polling can be traced back to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s consultation with Princeton professor Hadley Cantril, but their relationship was merely unofficial and episodic (Eisinger, 2003). It is John F. Kennedy and Louis Harris who made presidential polling an official and routine practice during the presidential election campaigns of 1960 (Jacobs & Shapiro, 1995; Moore, 1995). During the election campaigns, Harris undertook massive polling to help Kennedy hone his campaign strategies – especially, how to overcome Kennedy’s disadvantages as the Catholic. Since then, private pollsters, unlike the earlier public pollsters who had claimed political neutrality in conducting opinion polling, have begun to take side with political parties to help their candidates win the election. On the Democratic side, Patrick Caddell, Peter Hart, and Irwin Harrison polled respectively for Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis. On the Republican side, Robert Teeter and Richard Wirthlin served Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, George Bush and Ronald Reagan during the 1970-80s (Moore, 1995). The leitmotiv to use opinion polling for election campaigns stems in part from the decline of political parties as the mobilizing force of votes and public opinion (Eisinger,

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2003). Along with the adoption of the Australian ballot (secret ballot) systems that replaced the split-tickets in the late 19th century, casting a ballot became a private action which is invisible to other people-- i.e., party organizers: “Since individual voters now had to mark the ballot rather than simply deposit it, the center of political gravity moved from party to voter” (Schudson, 1998. p.170). The changes in the ballot system also lead to the adoption of presidential primaries as the platform for nominating party candidates in the election, and there was no guarantee that those who had greater influence in the party could be nominated. Thus, for presidential candidates, opinion polling looked appealing, because pollsters claimed that they could make visible the private actions of voters. Employed by presidential candidates, pollsters measure the voting strengths and weaknesses of those candidates and competitors (Crespi, 1989). Presidential private polls are used to (1) assess vote choices among the electorates, (2) identify the relative importance of issues in the election, and (3) judge majority issue positions among the electorates vis-à-vis candidate’s. Furthermore, private pollsters engage in (4) framing persuasive messages, first through focus group interviews, and second by testing the effectiveness of those messages to the general electorates. Once the president is elected, private pollsters continue to serve the president to (5) gauge job approval ratings, party identification, and issue positions. The questions asked by private polls are very similar to the questions asked by public polls such as the Gallup Poll except that private pollsters are more oriented toward their commissioners’ success than accuracy. For example, the

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questions that presidential pollsters frequently ask for the incumbent Presidents include (Heith, 2004. p.43):

[Presidential Popularity] Do you approve or disapprove of the job the president doing?  Do you approve or disapprove of the president’s handling of the economy?    [Policy] What do you feel should be done to avoid the crisis in the social security  system?    [Party Identification] Do you consider yourself a Democrat, Republican, or Independent?   

Interestingly, private polls for the incumbent presidents tended to ask a greater number of questions about policies than job approval ratings throughout the 1980-90s (see Heith, 2004. P.45), which suggests that social issues and policies have become an increasingly prominent platform of election-engineering for the reelection.

Media Polling 

Media polling refers to the polling conducted or sponsored by news organizations and instituted since the mid-1970s in partnership with polling organizations or other news organizations. The institution of media polling represents a complex relationship between the news media and public opinion.33 To begin with, the news media are often regarded as an institution reflecting public opinion independent of public opinion polling. As noted in Chapter 2, Floyd 33

Chapter 5 will discuss this topic in greater detail.

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Allport (1937) criticized the ‘journalistic fallacy’ of equating media content with public opinion on the ground that media content (e.g., editorials, columns, commentaries, street interviews) is merely a metonymic measure of public opinion. Similarly, Gallup and Rae (1940) saw that, in contrast to opinion polling, newspapers mold public opinion as well as reflecting it. Media content within this sort of conception has been demoted to the position of the ‘surrogate’ measure of public opinion, complementing official opinion polling data when the latter is unavailable. For example, in a series of interviews with policy experts, Susan Herbst (1998) notes that policymakers tend to use media content as the vicarious cues of public opinion, and then suggests that the mass media be seen as ‘both manipulators and representatives of public attitudes’ (p.185) and ‘content analysis as a window to understanding public opinion’ (p.183). However, this categorical separation of news media from public opinion polling is misleading in that, in terms of institutional relationship, the news media and public opinion polling are neither mutually exclusive nor competitive. On the contrary, the news media have been the prime driving force for public opinion polling for the purpose of covering elections. As early as 1824, newspapers such as the Harrisburg Pennsylvanian and the Raleigh Star used straw polls to ‘report on the popular appeal of the presidential candidates’ (quoted from Mann & Orren, 1992). The Literary Digest which was defeated by Gallup in 1936 used straw polls to predict the winner of the presidential election. Gallup, Roper and Crossley also conducted scientific opinion polls in association with the news media like America Speak!, Fortune magazine, and the Hearst press (J. Converse,

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1987). In short, from the beginning, public opinion polling was an instrument in news reporting of presidential elections.

The present institutionalization of polling in universities and in independent research organizations should not obscure their financing, past and present, by news organizations that, of course, in recent years have developed their own extensive polling services. Polling questions are still designed not to afford general knowledge of public opinion so much as to generate news. It is not a matter of any lasting scientific interest if people prefer candidate A to candidate B in “trial heats” a year before an election, but it is of news interest. (Schudson, 1998, p.224)

While the new media were the primary syndicated purchasers of the opinion poll data (Robinson, 1999), the relationship between the media and opinion polling, at least, in the United States has been substantially transformed since the 1970s, as media polling began to be institutionalized within the news media. 34 In other words, the news media created their own polling departments instead of reporting the syndicated polls. It was CBS that in partnership with the New York Times pioneered in-house media polling in 1975 (Moore, 1995; Asher 1988). The partnership between metropolitan newspapers and television networks became fashionable. Following the CBS/New York Times predecessor, television networks like ABC, NBC, and CNN joined media polling in partnership with the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Time/Gallup. Implementation of media polling has allowed journalists to ask their own poll questions; 34

There is no comprehensive study concerning how media polling has become so popular in the United States. Even though many newspapers were subscribed to polling organization, journalists were skeptical about the validity of opinion polling before the 1970s. In particular, when famous pollsters like Gallup, Roper and Crossley failed to correctly predict the result of the 1948 presidential election, many newspapers withdrew their subscription. Moreover, there was a series of congressional hearings to restrict or regulate the reporting of polls in the late 1960s.

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when they relied on syndicated polling, journalists could not easily report opinion polling results regarding pressing events and issues. Although media polling has enabled journalists to cover various events and social issues with the poll data, election coverage is a driving force behind establishing media polling, and the ‘trial heats’ of presidential election still remain the major focus of media pollsters (Ladd & Benson, 1992). Because news is primarily about the present and future events rather than the past, reporting ('horse-race' reporting) about upcoming events like the presidential election is of the greatest importance to journalists and media pollsters.

Exit Polling 

Exit polling is the practices of conducting surveys on Election Day with actual voters, when they leave or exit the polling booth. In the United States, exit polling is a sub-genre of media polling. Warren Mitofsky (1991) is credited with having invented exit polling in 1972, when he was the director of surveys at CBS News. Since then, exit polling has been operated by a consortium (Voter News Service) of media pollsters from ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News and the Associated Press. Although exit polling is generally famous or notorious for announcing the winner of election just hours before all votes are counted, the exit poll questionnaire asks many questions other than ‘who did you vote for.’ Exit poll questions include questions about vote choice, issues and demographic information, and issue questions are used to explain why respondents voted for certain candidates (Traugott & Lavrakas, 2008).

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Academic Polling 

Academic polling largely represented by the American National Election Studies’ (ANES) based at the University of Michigan and the ‘General Social Survey’ (GSS) at the University of Chicago asks a battery of the same questions repeatedly over time. Especially, the ANES, conducted before and after every presidential election, provides academicians who are interested in politics and election with analyzable raw data sets. For example, political communication research such as ‘agenda-setting’ (McCombs & Shaw, 1972) and ‘priming’ (Kinder & Inyengar, 1987) has been built upon interrelations between issue importance and/or vote choice question and news stories.

4.3. METHOD: CONTENT ANALYSIS OF POLL QUESTIONS In order to empirically explore the thesis of the supremacy of election frames in public opinion polling, a content analysis of poll questions was conducted concerning the two social issues – ‘same-sex marraige’ and ‘abortion. The reason for choosing the issues of same-sex marriage and abortion stems from the fact that, to pollsters, these two issues have become more important political issues. As the following example of poll questions attests, in asking an issue importance question, pollsters accord ‘gay marriage’ and ‘abortion’ the status representing the ‘moral value issues,’ and assume that, in recent American politics, the importance of those two issues is comparable to ‘the economy, health care costs, the situation in Iraq or the war on terrorism.’

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Which of the following issues is most important to you in deciding how you  might vote for President in November 2004 – the economy, moral value issues  such as gay marriage and abortion, health care costs, the situation in Iraq, or  the war on terrorism? (Time/SRBI Poll: Aug. 2004)   

Amongst many moral issues such as crime, the death penalty, gun control, biomedical engineering, and surrogate pregnancy, pollsters pose only ‘gay marriage’ and ‘abortion’ as relevant to ‘voting for President’ in an election. The following two sections will analyze the process by which poll questions about same-sex marriage and abortion are framed as relevant to election.

Data Set 

Poll questions were electronically retrieved from the IPoll Databank of the Roper Center based at the University of Connecticut (http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu). The IPoll Databank stores up-to-date poll questions and basic results from the major US survey institutions; comprehensive media polls (e.g., Los Angeles Times Poll) and commercial polls (e.g., Gallup Poll), some of the reputable academic polls (American National Election Studies, General Social Surveys), and few private polls conducted by Democratic or Republican pollsters. To search relevant poll questions up until the year 2005, two terms, “gay OR lesbian OR same sex OR civil unions” and “abortion” were used with the Boolean search option respectively for same-sex and abortion, and 921 questions (same-sex) and 2958 (abortion) questions were retrieved.

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Analytical Strategies: Abductive Content Analysis 

Although content analysis is basically a quantitative technique in that researchers convert words and sentences into calculable numbers and report frequencies of occurrences of textual matter in chosen categories, conducting a content analysis involves qualitative processes. To begin with, the primary goal of content analysis is ‘making replicable and valid inferences from texts (or other meaningful matter) to the contexts of their use’ (Krippendorff, 2004. p.18), and such inferences are abductive as well as deductive or inductive. An abductive inference, proposed by the pragmatism philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (Liszka, 1996), is distinguished from inductive and deductive inferences in that an abductive inference proceeds ‘across logically distinct domains, from particulars of one kind to particulars of another kind’ (Krippendorff, 2004. p.36). For example, when we see a graduate student with dark circles around his eyes, we can infer that he is not getting enough sleep, and he is hard pressed by his studying. That is, from a particular case of facial outlook, we can make inferences about another particular case regarding his sleep habits and hard works in his studies. Here, first, we can observe that abductive inferences are based on the symptomatic or indexical data: dark circles are a symptom or indicator of not sleeping enough. The nature of such indexical data is that they are existentially connected to an entity or state of affairs showing such symptoms, and abductive reasoning starts from discovering such symptoms. Similarly, in content analysis, statistical tables, graphs and charts drawn from frequencies of occurrence are treated as the index of the socialcultural-political contexts existentially connected to the textual matter, and content

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analysis proceeds from discovering notable symptoms towards the contexts. Accordingly, in this study, the overall distributions of poll questions will be treated as the indexical data. Instead of presenting statistical frequencies as the evidence corroborating hypotheses, this study treats such distributions as a clue leading to further inferences. Second, abductive reasoning is an interpretative process susceptible to multiple interpretations, because multiple values and various realities can be manifested in a single index. Linguistic indices (or deixis) are typical in that respect. Everyone refers to oneself as the ‘I,’ and, thus, it is difficult to identify a person only with the deixis I. In the example above, the same dark circles may be interpreted alternatively as a mental health problem: e.g., ‘he is suffering from hallucinations causing somnambulism.’ Because of the ambivalent nature of the index,35 making a more plausible inference requires further contextual information. If we know the proper name of a person, it is much easier to identify that person who refers to himself as ‘I.’ If we know the person who has dark circles around the eyes is a graduate student, it is more likely that those dark circles are an indicator of his hard works at school. Therefore, an abductive inference proceeds drawing a hermeneutic circle in which a textual matter enables an inference to the context, and, in turn, contextual information specifies the meanings of the textual matter. In this regard, examining a historical context in which the index is embedded is essential, because “a language [as an indexical reference] is the sedimented product of myriad acts

35

Sometimes, this ambivalence is confusingly called ‘indexicality’: a word or document can be taken as ‘indicative of at least two alternative underlying realities’ (Woolgar, 1988. p.32), or two different words or documents indicate a single reality.

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in relation to the value horizons of speakers, addressees, and other receivers” (Hanks, 1996. p.181). In content analysis, ambivalence is an issue especially relating to constructing classifatory schemes and measurable variables. Specifically, let us suppose that there are two different poll questions about a Supreme Court decision on abortion. One question asks ‘Are you favorable or unfavorable to the 1973 Supreme Court decision allowing second trimester abortions?,’ and another question asks ‘Do you agree or disagree with overturning the 1973 Supreme Court decision allowing second trimester abortions?.’ Here, a content analyst encounters the problem of ambivalence as to whether these two questions should be assigned to one category, or separate categories. At the surface level, both questions seem to address a single issue, say, attitudes toward the Supreme Court decision, with slightly different question wordings. As we shall see, this is not so. Once those questions are placed in their political-historical contexts, they must be assigned different values. An abductive content analysis should not be led by concepts and hypotheses a priori held by the analyst but guided by contextual understandings sensitive to the dynamic historical processes in which various social actors play language games by transforming discursive terrains and inventing new vocabularies. Third, being a hypothetical guess, an abductive inference alone does not ensure generality.36 Abduction is not a process by which we confirm hypotheses but only the process by which we arrive at plausible hypotheses or accounts of events (Liszka, 1996). Namely, an interrelation between dark circles and being a graduate student is

36

For this reason, formal logicians do not accept abduction as a valid logic.

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hypothetically established with a particular case. In order to establish a more generalizable interrelation (e.g., many graduate students have dark circles around their eyes.), inductive observations should follow and corroborate the validity of an abductive inference. Therefore, overall, a content analysis of poll questions in this chapter consists of (1) discovering notable symptoms from frequencies of occurrences of poll questions, (2) making abductive inferences to certain poll questions in light of socio-political contexts, and (3) inductive confirmations on the inferences.

4.4. POLL QUESTIONS ABOUT SAME-SEX MARRIAGE

 

4.4.1. Same‐Sex Relationship as a Moral Issue  The issue of same-sex marriage was initially a moral issue about which pollsters

not only paid little attention but also asked generic questions. The first question archived in the IPoll reads:

What about sexual relations between two adults of the same‐sex – do you think  it is always wrong, almost always wrong, wrong only sometimes, or not wrong  at all? (General Social Survey: Feb‐Apr, 1973) 

Asked by an academic survey institution (GSS) implemented in 1972, this question was among the many items designed to measure people’s moral attitudes over time. During the period from 1973 to 1982, only 8 questions in total were asked about the same-sex 126

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Figure 4.1. Poll Questions about Same-Sex Issues (1973-2005)

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X axis = Year, Y axis= Number of poll questions

issue for ten years, and 6 of the 8 were the same question biannually asked by the GSS, whereas the Gallup Poll (AIPO) asked no questions about the same-sex issue. The questions first asked by media pollsters (i.e., Los Angeles Times) came in 1983, concerning whether ‘homosexuality/lesbianism’ is ‘a private matter that should never be talked about,’ whether the respondents ‘feel uncomfortable’ when they are ‘around homosexual men,’ and whether ‘armed services should be able to discharge a soldier, because he or she is a homosexual or a lesbian.’ As Figure 4.1 shows, there was a moderate increase in the number of poll questions in 1985 (n=23), when same-sex relations became associated with AIDS, and media pollsters were quick to ask questions in connection to the disease, which lasted until the early 1990s.   Do you think ‘AIDS’ (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) affects more  people today who are homosexual, or gay, or do you think it affects more  people who are heterosexual, or straight? (Los Angeles Times Poll: Dec. 1985)    (As I read off each item, one at a time, would you tell me whether you think it is  or is not a way for people to catch AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency  Syndrome)? … Intimate sexual contact with a person of the same sex. (Gallup  Poll: Nov. 1989) 

As the question’s wording shows, same-sex couples throughout the 1970s and 80s were regarded as abnormal minorities especially tagged as ‘homosexual.’ The GSS question presumes that ‘sexual relations between two adults of the same-sex’ are basically ‘wrong,’ and the choice offered to respondents is about just a matter of degree – ‘always wrong/almost always wrong/sometimes wrong/not wrong at all.’ Los Angeles Times poll questions also implicate an uneasy relationship with the presence of 128

homosexuals in daily life. Poll questions about AIDS infections fall under the purview of the morality of sexual behaviors of the minorities.

 

4.4.2. ‘Gay Rights’: Same‐Sex Relationship as a Civil Rights Issue  In the 1992 presidential election, the same-sex issue debuted as an election issue.

While there were two questions about the same-sex issue regarding the presidential election before 1992, those questions were concerned with gays’ or lesbians’ qualification for presidential office. In contrast, a new question that appeared during the 1992 presidential election campaigns framed the same-sex issue as ‘equal rights,’ after Democratic candidate, Bill Clinton expressed his position on the issue. Do you think Bill Clinton has gone too far in supporting equal rights for  homosexuals, not far enough or has his position on gay rights been about right?  (Gallup/CNN/USA Today Poll: Aug. 1992)   

As the question wordings show, at first, the focus of the question was placed solely on Clinton’s support for the ‘equal rights for homosexuals.’ Before long, however, pollsters started to see ‘gay rights’ as a dividing line between Republican and Democratic candidates, and asked questions concerning the vote choice between Bush and Clinton, the issue importance of ‘gay rights’ in the impending presidential election, and party supports in relation to ‘gay rights,’ as if no consensus on the ‘gay rights’ issue could be established between the two parties.

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[Vote Choice] The Democratic and Republican parties have different positions on gay rights  and laws to prohibit discrimination against gays and lesbians. Who do you think  has the better policies on these issues – George Bush or Bill Clinton? (Harris  Poll: Oct. 1992)      [Issue Importance] How strongly do you feel about the issue of gay rights as a political issue in the  1992 presidential election – very strongly, somewhat strongly, not very strongly  or not at all strongly? (Harris Poll: Oct. 1992)      [Party Support] When it comes to the policies and the goals of the Republican (Democratic)  party on … social issues, such as abortion and gay rights … do you strongly  agree, mainly agree, have mixed feelings, mainly disagree, or do you strongly  disagree with the party’s policies and goals? (NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll:  Dec. 1992)     

Furthermore, after Clinton was elected, ‘gay rights’ became to be included as a regular item on the list of various issues whereby presidential popularity is assessed.

[Presidential Popularity] Now thinking about some issues, do you approve or disapprove of the way Bill  Clinton is handling … gay rights. (Gallup/CNN/USA Today Poll: Apr. 1993)   

Not only did the issue of ‘gay rights’ prompt the election frames, it also led pollsters to ask new questions about specific policies and social movement activists under the rubric of ‘civil rights,’ or ‘anti-discrimination.’ As Figure 4.1 shows, a greater number of poll questions were asked in 1993 (n=44) than in the 1992 election year (n=22), and the same number of questions in 1994 (n=22). During 1993-94, 25 out of 66 questions (38%) dealt 130

with policies (n=17) and social movements for or against gay rights (n=8), whereas 14 out of 66 (21%) dealt with presidential popularity, issue importance and party supports. The remaining 27 questions were about personal experience or knowledge of gays and lesbians (n=10), generic attitudes (n=8) and AIDS or morality (n=9). The policy questions were asked about ‘allowing openly gay men and lesbian women to serve in the military’ (NBC News/Wall Street Journal: Apr.1993), ‘allowing gay couples to adopt a child’ (U.S. News & World Report: May 1993), ‘inheritance rights for gay spouses,’ ‘social security benefits for gay spouses,’ and ‘legally-sanctioned gay marriage’ (PSRA/Newsweek: Feb. 1994).

 

4.4.3. ‘Gay Marriage’ vs. ‘Gay Rights’: Same‐Sex Relationship as a Legal Issue  Whilst the legal recognition of same-sex marriage or ‘gay marriage’ was just one

of the several policy issues relating to ‘gay rights,’ it became a major legal issue in 1996, when Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act denying federal recognition of samesex marriage. A poll question sponsored by Congress in 1996 reads: Some members of Congress have proposed a bill defining marriage as only  between men and women for purposes of federal law. The proposed bill would  also allow individual states not to recognize gay marriages legally performed in  other states. Do you favor or oppose this bill or don’t you have an opinion on  this? (Defense of Marriage Act Poll: May‐Jun. 1996)   

Although Bill Clinton signed into the bill in 1996, it did not still develop into a salient election issue, arguably because the passage of the Act conformed to Republican policies

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leaving little room for electoral controversies. In 1996, only 4 out of 44 poll questions were framed as an election issue, and the question wordings of the election-framed questions adhered to the ‘gay rights’ issue like those in the 1992 presidential election. On the other hand, questions about ‘gay marriage’ yet remained as a legal issue not enclosed in the election frames. For example, a question by an institution associated with Republican presidential pollster, Richard Wirthlin, reads. Do you feel same‐sex couples should have the right to be legally married?  (Wirthlin Quorum Survey: Dec. 1996) 

The 2000 election showed a pattern that was similar to the 1996 election. Out of 93 questions asked in 2000, 42 questions were asked by a single survey called ‘Views on Issues and Policies Related to Sexual Orientation Survey’ which asked mostly about personal experiences and specific policy issues. Excluding these, overall 51 questions were asked in 2000. Among the 14 election-framed questions, ‘gay rights’ was the only term used: ‘gay marriage’ stayed outside the election frames.

 Regardless of which 2000 presidential candidate you now support, please tell  me whether you think Al Gore or George W. Bush would do a better job of  handling each of the following issues as President … gay rights?  (PSRA/Newsweek Poll: Jul. 2000)       

Meanwhile, in 2000, a new term ‘civil unions’ was introduced to poll questions asking about same-sex relationship as a legal issue. Differentiated from ‘gay marriage’ as giving formal legal recognition to same-sex couples, ‘civil unions’ was defined as

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allowing some equal legal rights in the areas such as health insurance, inheritance and pension coverage.

Would you vote … for or against a law that would allow homosexual couples to  legally form civil unions, giving them some of the legal rights of married  couples? (Gallup Poll: Oct. 2000)   

Although Republicans insisted that there is little difference between ‘gay marriage’ and ‘civil unions,’ pollsters used the two terms as different categories. At first, pollsters asked about ‘gay marriage’ and ‘civil unions’ in two separate questions, and later, they incorporated two terms in one question.     Which of the following arrangements between gay or lesbian couples do you  think should be recognized as legally valid – same‐sex marriage / civil unions  but not same‐sex marriage / neither same‐sex marriage nor civil unions?  (Gallup/CNN/USA Today Poll: Nov. 2004)     

Incorporation of the two terms into one question was associated with ‘an unmistakable rise in the public’s support for some legal recognition of same-sex couples,’ namely, for ‘civil unions’ (Egan, Persily & Wallsten, 2008. p.253). That is to say, when both terms were presented as choice options in a single question, 50-60% of respondents were favorable to ‘civil unions,’ whereas when ‘civil unions’ was individually offered, the rate was about 40%. Pollsters are familiar with this ‘contrast effects’ (Bradburn & Sudman, 1980), a good example of the ‘momentary construction of survey answers’ explored in Chapter 3. However, this result facilitated media pollsters to announce that the majority

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of the American public had become favorable to allowing legal marriage for same-sex couples (Egan, Persily & Wallsten, 2008).

4.4.4. ‘Gay Marriage’: Same‐Sex Relationship as a Political Issue  During the 2004 presidential election campaigns, ‘gay marriage’ became a big political issue. Pollsters asked 347 questions (Figure 4.1) about the same-sex issue. Of these, 134 questions (39%) were explicitly election- framed in terms of vote choice, issue importance or partisan support, and 99 questions (28%) dealt with the issue of legalizing ‘gay marriage’ and ‘civil unions.’ The bedrock in this upsurge of poll questions in 2004 was George W. Bush’s proposal for a constitutional amendment banning ‘gay marriage’ in February 2004, when his Republican Party took a majority seat on Capitol Hill.

Should the U.S. Constitution be amended to ban gay marriage, or is it enough  to prohibit gay marriage by law without changing the Constitution? (Pew News  Interest Index Poll: Oct. 2003)     

As such, all of the election-framed questions used ‘gay marriage’ as the catchword representing the whole gamut of same-sex issues.

[Vote Choice] Which [2004 Presidential election] candidate do you think would do a better job  on the following issue (George W. Bush or John Kerry) … Gay Marriage.  (Fox  News/Opinion Dynamics Poll: Aug 2004)    [Issue Importance] Which of the following issues is most important to you in deciding how you  might vote for President in November 2004 – the economy, moral value issues  134

such as gay marriage and abortion, health care costs, the situation in Iraq, or  the war on terrorism? (Time/SRBI Poll: Aug. 2004)    [Party Support] When it comes to dealing with gay marriage, which party do you think would do  a better job – the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, both about the same,  or neither. (NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll: Jan. 2004)   

In comparison with the preceding elections (see the 1992 examples), the term ‘gay rights’ was replaced by ‘gay marriage,’ and unlike the 2000 election in which ‘gay marriage’ was merely a legal issue not enclosed into election frames, it became heavily electionframed in the 2004 election. As the example of the issue importance question shows, pollsters presented the importance of ‘gay marriage’ on a par with ‘the economy,’ an indispensible election issue of all time.

 

4.4.5. Summary View  To recapitulate, starting as a moral and health issue, the issue of same-sex

relationships underwent several transformations. (1) It became a civil rights issue in 1992, when Bill Clinton expressed his view on same-sex as ‘gay rights.’ Although pollsters began to ask typical election-framed questions during the 1992-2000 period, however, ‘gay rights’ for pollsters was not an important election issue. (2) After Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act (1996), pollsters also asked questions about ‘gay marriage’ as a legal issue, not as an election issue. (3) In 2000, a new concept ‘civil unions’ was invented as a competing or alternative concept to ‘gay marriage,’ and, as such, poll questions about ‘civil unions’ created a more favorable moods for same-sex

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relationships. (4) In response, George W. Bush called for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage at the dawn of his presidential election campaigns, and then, pollsters asked an unprecedented number of election-framed questions about same-sex relationships making it a major political front in the 2004 presidential election. So far, the analysis has showed the process by which same-sex relationships became an election issue. Figure 4.2 illustrates which questions pollsters mostly asked about the same-sex issues. As it shows, election- framed questions take the first place (27%) followed by legalization or illegalization (20%). Figure 4.3 shows that, during the election years, pollsters asked mostly election-framed (32%) and legal (23%) questions. Moreover, during the non-election years, pollsters still placed one out of five questions in election-frames (19%). Lastly, Figure 4.4 displays that, among the questions asked by media pollsters, election-framed questions are the largest proportion (33%) followed by legalization (18%) by a relatively large margin. Among the non-media polls, generic attitude questions (25%) were placed at the top followed by legalization (22%) and election frames (18%). In short, these graphs demonstrate the dominance of the election frame in poll questions about same-sex relationships.

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Figure 4.2 Distributions of Polling Issues about Same-Sex Relationships 30

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Figure 4.3 Distributions of Polling Issues about Same-Sex Relationships (Election Year vs. Non-election Year)

  35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0 Election

Legalization Experience Election Year

Generic

Policy

Civil Right

AIDS

Non‐Election Year

   

* Each bar represents percentage.   

 

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 Figure 4.4 Distributions of Polling Issues about Same-Sex Relationships (Media vs. Non-Media) 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0 Election

Legalization Experience

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Media

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Civil Right

AIDS

 

Non‐Media

  * Each bar represents percentage.

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4.5. POLL QUESTIONS ABOUT ABORTION

As Figure 4.5 illustrates, the distribution of poll questions about abortion shows dramatic increases beginning in 1989. In 1989 alone, pollsters asked the largest number of questions about abortion (n=379) from 1962 to 2005. Even when 147 questions asked in a single survey conducted by the Los Angeles Times are subtracted from the total, the number (n=232) of poll questions in 1989 is still second-largest after 1992 (n=240). In this regard, a cross-tabulation of poll questions (Table 4.1) reveals an interesting fact.

Table 4.1 Number of Poll Questions about Abortion (Election vs. Non-election Years) Election Years

Non-Election Years

1962-1988

Total = 143 Average per year=20

Total = 467 Average=23

1990-2005

Total = 747 Average =187

Total = 1214 Average=101

Before 1989, pollsters asked about 20 questions on average in presidential election years, and this number is slightly smaller than the average (=23) of non-election years. However, this picture is reversed after 1990. During 1990-2005, pollsters asked 187 questions on average in presidential election years, while they asked 101 questions in

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1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005

Figure 4.5 Poll Questions about Abortion (1962-2005)

450

400

350

300

250

200

150

100

50

0

X axis = Year, Y axis= Number of poll questions

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non-election years. This fact implies that the year 1989 was the watershed of public opinion polling in framing abortion as an election issue.   4.5.1. Abortion as a Legal Issue before 1989  Abortion is foremost a legal issue. The earliest poll questions of the Gallup Poll (AIPO) asked about the legalization of abortion in special cases such as ‘where the health of the mother in danger,’ ‘where the family does not have enough money to support another child,’ ‘where the pregnancy was a result of rape or incest’ and ‘where there is a strong chance of serious defect in the baby.’

Do you think abortion operations should or should not be legal in the following  cases? … Where the health of the mother is in danger? (Gallup Poll: Aug. 1962)    Do you think abortion operations should or should not be legal in the following  cases: where the family does not have enough money to support another child?  (Gallup Poll: Sep. 1969)   

In 1973, there was a Supreme Court decision, now known as Roe v. Wade, which ruled that state laws which make it illegal for a woman to have an abortion up until three months of pregnancy are unconstitutional, and that the decision on whether a woman should have an abortion up until three months of pregnancy should be left to the woman and her doctor to decide. Although Roe v. Wade became a salient national issue at that time (Luks & Salamone, 2008), pollsters did not ask many questions about the Supreme Court decision, while they repeatedly asked a battery of questions about the legalization

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of abortion in special cases and private attitudes toward abortion. In 1973, pollsters asked only 2 questions about the Supreme Court decision, and during the period 1973 to 1988, 39 out of 541 questions (7%) were explicitly concerned with it. This percentage is lower than the overall percentage (12%, see Figure 4.6).

4.5.2. Abortion as a Political Issue before 1989  Abortion was not an important election issue before 1989. During the period 1962 to 1988, pollsters asked 97 questions (18%) directly framed as an election issue including the congressional election. While the percentage of election frames is higher than that of the court decision in the same period, it is still below the overall percentage of 24 (Figure 4.6). To date, the first election-framed question was asked in 1974. As the question wordings of the Gallup Poll suggest, abortion was just one of the, at the very least, 12 issues selected by Gallup pollsters. Moreover, politicians seldom expressed their positions on abortion openly, and hence, the questions’ wording in election frames was vague without specifically mentioning candidates’ names or partisan positions.

[Issue Importance] Suppose that one election day, November 5 (1974), you could vote on these key  issues. Please tell me how you would vote on each, remembering that you  should try to vote for or against each proposition, just as you would in a regular  referendum. Proposition 12: Abortion. (Gallup Poll: Oct. 1974)    Would you vote for or against a candidate just on the basis of his position on  the abortion? (Time Yankelovich, Skelly & White Poll: Sep. 1976)   

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Did a candidate’s position on any of these issues make a difference in your vote  today (in the 1978 Congressional election)? … Abortion (CBS News Exit Poll:  Nov. 1978).   

It was not until 1980 that poll questions could be unambiguously framed as an election issue in the presidential election. As the question suggests, both parties overtly expressed their positions on abortion during the 1980 election campaigns, and pollsters offered the names of presidential candidates in the vote choice option.

[Vote Choice] The Democratic Party has endorsed the right of women to have an abortion,  while the Republican Party strongly opposes abortion. Do these positions on  abortion make you more likely to vote for Jimmy Carter or more likely to vote  for Ronald Reagan (for president in 1980), or don’t these positions on abortion  make a difference? (NBC News/Associated Press Poll: Aug. 1980)   

While the same kind of vote choice questions were repeated in the 1984 (Reagan vs. Mondale) and 1988 (Bush vs. Dukakis) presidential election, however, abortion was not yet stabilized as an election issue. First, no presidential popularity question in relation to abortion was asked during this period. Even though pollsters had checked presidential popularity since 1941, the first popularity question dealing with abortion came only in 1989, and this fact implies that, before 1989, abortion was not a yardstick by which the popularity of an elected president was canvassed.

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[Presidential Popularity] (Now let me ask you about some specific problems facing the country. As I read  off each one, would you tell me whether you approve or disapprove of the way  President Bush is handling that problem?) … The abortion issue. (Gallup Poll:  Nov. 1989)   

Second, pollsters were still uncertain as to whether abortion could become an election issue, and asked a greater number of questions regarding issue importance rather than vote choice or partisan support: 52 out of 97 questions (54%) were devoted to the issue importance before 1989 (Table 4.3).

 

4.5.3. Abortion as a Legal Issue since 1989  In 1989, there was another Supreme Court decision known as Webster v.

Reproductive Health Service. Continuing to ask a large battery of questions about the legalization of abortion in special cases, specific policies (e.g., parental permission for abortion under the age of 18, adoption of the contraceptive pill) and generic attitude questions (i.e., pro-life vs. pro-choice), in 1989 alone, pollsters asked 51 questions about the Supreme Court decision, outnumbering even the sum of questions asked over 16 years since Roe v. Wade (n=39, see Table 4.2). Before the decision was made in July, pollsters anticipated that the Supreme Court might overturn Roe v. Wade, and introduced a new type of question about ‘overturning’ the 1973 decision.

Regardless of your own personal opinion on abortion, how likely do you think it  is that over the next five years the U.S. Supreme Court will overturn its decision 

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that legalized abortion? Do you think this is very likely, somewhat likely, or not  very likely? (NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll: Jan. 1989)   

Instead of overturning Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decided by 5-4 that individual states should regulate and limit abortions. However, pollsters did not stop asking about

Table 4.2 Poll Questions about Supreme Court Decisions Roe v. Wade Questions

Questions about Other Supreme Court Decisions

Total

1973-1988 (16 years)

14 (36%)

25 (64%)

39 (100%)

1989-2005 (17 years)

163 (54%)

141 (46%)

304 (100%)

the possibility of overturning Roe v. Wade even after Webster v. Reproductive Health Service. The Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision established a woman’s  constitutional right to an abortion, at least in the first three months of  pregnancy. Would you like to see the Supreme Court completely overturn its  Roe v. Wade decision or not? (Gallup Poll: Oct. 1989)       

Even though there were other important Supreme Court decisions about abortion such as Casey v. Planned Parenthood (Luks & Salamone, 2008), only a handful of questions

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(n=5) were asked only in 1992. Instead, pollsters focused on the possibility of overturning Roe v. Wade.

  This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision called Roe v.  Wade which made abortion in the first three months of pregnancy legal. Do you  think the Supreme Court would overturn Roe v. Wade, or let it stand? (Fox  News/Opinion Dynamics Poll: Jan. 1998)    The Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision established a woman’s  constitutional right to an abortion, at least in the first three months of  pregnancy. Would you like to see the Supreme Court completely overturn its  Roe v. Wade decision or not? (NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll: Dec. 2005)   

Why did pollsters focus on Roe v. Wade? Why did pollsters ask much more questions about Roe v. Wade since 1989 (n=163) than they did before 1989 (n=14)? Why were pollsters interested in ‘overturning’ Roe v. Wade?37 The answer is that there was a hidden seed of presidential politics in ‘overturning’ Roe v. Wade. That is to say, the tight Supreme Court decision by 5-4 not to overturn Roe v. Wade can be reversed, if one justice is replaced by another, and the right to nominate a new Supreme Court justice is in the hands of president. Indeed, pollsters were also greatly interested in Supreme Court nominees.

From what you know about Clarence Thomas [nominated by President George  Bush], how likely is it that if confirmed to the Supreme Court he would vote to  overturn Roe v. Wade – the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion?  Would you say … very likely, somewhat likely, not too likely, or not at all likely?  (Gallup Poll: Sep. 1991)    37

Among the 163 questions about Roe v. Wade, 57 questions (35%) concerned ‘overturning’ the decision.

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As you may know, President George W. Bush has nominated Judge Samuel Alito  to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. … Just you best guess. If Alito were  confirmed to the Supreme Court, do you think he would – or would not – vote  to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision on abortion? (Gallup/CNN/USA Today  Poll: Nov. 2005)   

Note here that the vast majority (67%) of the Roe v.Wade questions during 19892005 (total n=163) were asked (1) in 1989 (n=22) when Webster v. Reproductive Health Service was decided, (2) in 1991 (n=38) when President Bush nominated Clarence Thomas as a Supreme Court Justice, (3) in 1992 (n=26), during presidential election campaigns, and (4) in 2005 (n=23), when President G.W. Bush nominated Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. Note also that these four years were when Republican presidents, whose position was against abortion, occupied the White House.

 

4.5.4. Abortion as a Political Issue since 1989  The development of abortion as an election issue should be viewed against the

backdrop of presidential politics concerning the Supreme Court decisions on abortion. In other words, since 1989, electing president has become a matter of shielding (Democrat) or ‘overturning’ (Republican) the Roe v. Wade decision. Although, in fact, the decision has never been overturned under Republican presidential leadership as of 2008, abortion has served as one of the most clearly defined platforms of partisan and electoral politics because of the possibility of ‘overturning’ the decision.38 In this regard, Table 4.3 gives

38

Calling President Obama “the most pro-abortion president to ever occupy the White House” Sarah Palin, a leader of the conservative movement, Tea Party, remarked on October 6, 2010 “it is essential that we use the 2010 midterms to elect a Congress that will make undoing the damage of Obamacare its first priority” (http:www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20018781-503544.html).

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sufficient hints as to how well abortion has become established as a political issue since 1989. When abortion was not a clear-cut political issue (1962-1988), in order to test if it could count as an election issue, pollsters asked more questions about the issue importance of abortion (n=52) than vote choice or partisan support (n=45). As already noted, no question about presidential popularity was asked until 1989. In contrast, during 1990-2005, pollsters asked a lot more questions about vote choice, partisan support or presidential popularity (n=389) than about the issue importance of abortion (n=145).

Table 4.3 Election-Framed Poll Questions about Abortion Issue Importance

Vote Choice/Party Support/Popularity

1962-1988

52 (54%)

45 (46%)

1990-2005

145 (27%)

389 (73%)

4.5.5. Summary View  Overall, before 1989, abortion was a legal issue that had little to do with elections, and pollsters paid scarce attention to Roe v. Wade of 1973. However, in the wake of the tight Webster v. Reproductive Health Service decision, which left the possibility of overturning Roe v. Wade, abortion abruptly became an election issue entangled with presidential influence on the Supreme Court, and, since then, pollsters began to ask a greater number of election-framed questions about abortion.

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In this context, Figure 4.6 shows the dominance of election-framed questions about abortion. The election-framed questions (24%) take the second place following the questions about legalizing abortion (26%) by a small margin. Here, it needs to be remembered that the legal category include a large number of questions about legalizing abortion in special cases. Figure 4.7 compares the distributions of poll question by election and non-election years. It is hardly surprising that election-framed questions take the first place during the election years, and legalization questions during the nonelection years. However, the differences of relative percentage between election and nonelection years are remarkable (election frames: 42% vs. 16%, legalization: 24% vs. 27%). As with the ‘same-sex’ issue, Figure 4.8 displays that media pollsters ask the largest portion of questions as election-framed (27%).

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Figure 4.6. Distributions of Polling Issues about Abortion 30

25

20

15

10

5

0

*Each bar represents percentage.  

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Figure 4.7.Distributions of Polling Issues about Abortion (Election Year vs. Non-election Year) 45 40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0

Election Year

Non‐election Year

*Each bar represents percentage.

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Figure 4.8.Distributions of Polling Issues about Abortion (Media vs. Non-Media) 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0

Media

Non‐Media

*Each bar represents percentage.

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4.6. DISCUSSION This chapter has explored the sovereign status of election frames in poll questions. Discussing various institutional contexts of independent polls, presidential polls, media polls, exit polls and academic polls, this chapter pointed out that elections (i.e., presidential election) are the primary platform on which poll questions are framed and asked. In general, a poll questionnaire consists of three different types of questions. First, pollsters ask questions evaluating politicians and parties. During election campaign periods, those questions concern supports for electoral candidates, and during nonelection periods, questions are about incumbent officials’ job approvals and would-be candidates’ performance in anticipation of the forthcoming election. Second, issue importance questions function as a filter with which pollsters sort out the salience of various economic-social-moral issues that might be relevant to evaluating politicians. Third, questions about the attitudes toward specific issues serve as a yardstick with which pollsters assess how vote choices are made. Through content analyses of poll questions about same-sex relationships and abortion, this chapter has empirically shown how those two issues, which initially had little to do with election, were transformed into political issues, and that pollsters ask a barrage of election-framed questions, only when those issues are judged to be relevant to electing officials and assessing politicians’ job approvals. Specifically, ‘same-sex relationships’ had been an issue relating to morality and health (i.e., AIDS) up until 1992, and pollsters only sporadically asked questions about this issue. It was as a result of Bill Clinton’s support for ‘gay rights’ (1992) and the Defense of Marriage Act (1996) that 154

pollsters started to ask more questions about same sex relationships in terms of the legal issue. The same sex issue reformulated as ‘gay marriage’ and ‘civil unions’ was the platform on which it has become a political issue since the presidential election of 2000, and pollsters asked the largest number of questions with election frames in 2004. Similarly, when centered on the Roe v. Wade decision (1973), abortion was largely a legal issue, but pollsters asked few questions concerning the Supreme Court decision itself. when, in 1989, the ‘overturning’ of the Roe v. Wade decision became a possibility along with a replacement of one of the Supreme Court justices by the president, pollsters started to treat abortion as a political issue relevant to electoral choices and job approvals. Although there were other important Supreme Court decisions like Casey v. Planned Parenthood (1992), those decisions were not of great interest to pollsters, because they were not considered as a political matter. Overall, in terms of sheer quantity, the explicitly election-framed poll questions were most prominent with respect to same-sex relationships and abortion regardless of whether or not those questions were asked during presidential election years. Moreover, media pollsters tended to focus on same-sex relationships and abortion as political issues to a greater degree. Opinion polling does not neutrally ‘measure’ or take a ‘snapshot’ of public opinion. Rather, public opinion is ‘constructed’ or ‘constrained’ by pollsters (Krippendorff, 2005; Lewis, 2001; Edelman, 1993; Bennett, 1993). As Verba (1996. p.6) acknowledges, (1) the poll agenda is imposed by pollsters, (2) although the selection of respondents may not be biased, the selection of when to have a survey and which questions to ask depends on pollsters, and (3) those who have more economic resources

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have more opportunities to conduct a survey. In short, polling questions reflect the interests of the institutions to which pollsters belong and/or sponsors whom they serve. As a result, in the United States, the greatest interest shared by polling institutions or their sponsors in various forms such as Gallup polls, presidential or partisan polls, academic polls and media polls is the presidential election. Although, following Bryce (1895), Gallup and Rae (1940) argued that opinion polling makes public opinion constantly hearable on various issues independently of periodic elections, elections constitute the primary platform on which poll questions are drafted. Thus, it is no wonder that, to most ordinary citizens, polling is associated with election predictions (Bogart, 1972). The close association between polling and election is also observed in other countries. Cowans (2002) documents that, in France, the techniques of opinion polling were first introduced by sociologist Jean Stoetzel as early as 1938. However, opinion polling had remained in the academic milieu without being associated with politics up until the late 1950s, when French politics was dominated by the Parliament, and the referendum was suspended in the wake of the Second World War. In 1958, France instituted a new constitution giving a greater power to the president and allowing a referendum, and it was during the 1965 election campaigns that French politicians (i.e., Charles de Gaulle) and journalists embraced opinion polling as a valid measure of election outcomes. Britain (Beers, 2006) showed a similar pattern. When opinion polling was introduced in the 1930s, politicians and journalists were antagonistic to polling. The Burkean conception of political representation in which the Parliament serves for the

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people rather than resembles them was pervasive among British political elites. However, the implementation of the general election and the return of a competitive two-party system after the Second World War led political parties to experiment with opinion polling.39 The problem with the predominance of the election frames in poll questions is that it hardly contributes to solving social issues. Knowing which issues are at stake in election and assessing how people think about president’s job handling may provide useful information to political elites including politicians, journalists and pollsters. Coopting ‘gay marriage’ amongst many same-sex issues and asking questions about the possibility of overturning the Roe v. Wade decision among several Supreme Court decisions help would-be presidents to develop their campaign strategies, and enables journalists to write sellable news stories. However, such information seldom serves the interests of ordinary citizens. Undoubtedly, electing the president by voting is an important moment in which ‘civil power’ is exercised (Alexander, 2006), but forecasting election outcomes has little to do with exercising civil power in the political process. Voting is a meaningful and responsible action entailing real consequences, whereas responding to poll questions does not have such effects. The following two typical

39

In Korea, it was in the early 1970s that the Gallup Korea was instituted, and Gallup and Rae’s book (1940) was translated. However, publishing opinion polls had been subject to censorship under the authoritarian government throughout the 1970s and 80s as in present-day China. A revision to the Constitution allowing a plebiscite in electing the president was made in the aftermath of the 1987 civil uprising, and, since the time, opinion polling has increasingly become an integral part of political parties’ primaries as well as media reporting of elections. For example, in 2002, former President, Roh Mu Hyun could become the presidential candidate of two parties -- the Democratic Party and People’s Victory 21 – which agreed to form a strategic alliance against the Grand National Party and jointly elect a candidate representing both parties. Surprisingly, the sole method used to nominate a joint candidate was opinion polling.

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questions relating to ‘gay marriage’ and ‘overturning the Roe v. Wade decision’ illustrate cases in which citizens themselves have no responsibility whatsoever.

Which (2004 Presidential election) candidate do you think would do a better  job on the following issue (George W. Bush of John Kerry) … Gay Marriage (Fox  News/Opinion Dynamics Poll: Aug. 2004).    As you may know, President George W. Bush has nominated Judge Samuel Alito  to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, do you think he would – or would not –  vote to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision on abortion? (Gallup/CNN/USA  Today Poll: Nov. 2005).   

As Leo Bogart (1972, p.198) trenchantly points out, “Opinions become meaningful only when they are linked to a consciousness of responsibility. The translation of opinion into action requires a combination of strong motivation and the sense that action can have meaningful consequences.” In this respect, opinion polling has failed to help citizens as responsible agent exercise civil power in the political process.

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______________ CHAPTER 5 ______________ PUBLIC OPINION AS NEWS: NEW YORK TIMES, 1896~2005

5.1. PROBLEMS OF REPORTED SPEECH The preceding two chapters have dealt with the communicative features operating in survey interviews in which interviewers exert institutional constraints and respondents offer improvised answers (Chapter 3) and the predominance of election-framed questions which constitute the content of public opinion (Chapter 4). Now, it is time to explore how those survey answers and questions in integration become the voice of people made publicly accessible especially by the news media. As discussed in Chapter 2, public opinion is essentially an instance of ‘reported speech’ (Voloshinov, 1973) double-voiced in nature. In reported speech, a reporting voice lends embodiment to the voice of the absent others, which in turn, constitutes the reported voice. The reported voice –namely, individual survey answers and questions— becomes hearable, inasmuch as a reporter serves as an intermediary agent who reproduces or re-presents the reported voice in other communicative contexts different

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from the original situations wherein the reported voice was first generated. From the double-voiced nature of reported speech, dialogism has drawn attention to the dynamic relationships between reporting speech and reported speech by focusing on (1) the ways in which the personhood of intermediary agents is established and (2) the linguistic styles that those intermediaries utilize in making a reported speech. In this regard, dialogism has underscored that reported speech is not only ‘speech within (reporting) speech’ but, more importantly, ‘speech about (other’s) speech’ (Voloshinov, 1973. p.115). In other words, reporting speech, although there are variations depending on whether it adopts a form of direct or indirect quotation style in reporting other’s speech, is inherently ‘reflexive’ (Lucy, 1993) in the sense that reporting speech analyzes and translates the original speech belonging to others as well as transmitting it. In a classic article titled ‘On saying that,’ Donald Davidson (1968) raises a crucial question about the nature of reported speech in regards to the sentence, ‘Galileo said that the earth moves.’ While, to English speakers, it is a plain fact that Galileo said that the earth moves, Galileo as Italian actually did not say ‘the earth moves.’ Galileo said something else different from what English speakers nowadays translate as such. According to Davidson, the English sentence, ‘Galileo said that the earth moves’ can be paraphrased as ‘Galileo uttered a sentence that meant in his mouth what ‘The earth moves’ means now in mine” (p.140). To put it differently, ‘The earth moves’ is English speakers’ translation or interpretation of Galileo’s original utterance in Italian or in Latin (e.g., ‘Eppur si muove’), not his own. Here, the function of the subordinate ‘that’ which separates the reported voice from the reporting voice reveals the reflexive nature of

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reported speech. The sentence, ‘Galileo said that the earth moves’ can be decomposed into two independent sentences. (1) The earth moves.  (2) Galileo said that.         

       According to Davidson, the use of the subordinate ‘that’ in reported speech originated from the use of ‘that’ as the demonstrative pronoun which indicates the previous sentence. As such, the reporting voice (‘Galileo said that’) is independent of the semantic content (‘The earth moves’) in the sense that what the demonstrative ‘that’ points to is not the meaning or semantic content of the sentence per se but the event of the past utterance (Galileo uttered some words). While the event of utterance belongs to Galileo, the meaning of ‘The earth moves’ belongs to the reporting voice. Therefore, the function of reported speech is essentially adapting the reported voice to the context of the reporting voice by connecting the past event of utterance to the current meaning. To clarify the point, we can here take one step further by inserting the example into a conversation between two people.      

(1’) Jason: The earth moves.  (2’) Chloe: Really? I have never felt so.   (3’) Jason: Galileo said that. 

In this example, Jason says ‘The earth moves,’ and Chloe questions the validity of Jason’s utterance. Instead of providing accounts for his claim, Jason attributes the authorship of his utterance to Galileo. Although the ownership of the utterance ‘The earth moves’ belongs to Jason and Galileo actually never uttered such words, Jason skillfully 161

makes use of other-reference by means of reported speech. That is, Jason speaks his own words by borrowing another’s mouth. In short, reported speech is not merely a physical movement of speech from one situation to another but an active appropriation and transformation of the original speech from the perspective of the reporting voice, and reported speech can serve as the ‘ventriloquist’ device (Cooren, 2010; Wortham & Locher, 1996) whereby one person (the reporting voice) delivers an other’s voice (reported voice), and in turn, the latter’s voice speaks what the former wants to say. Although Davidson’s example mainly deals with problems in translating foreign languages, the problem of reported speech permeates any type of speech genres that takes the grammatical form of reported speech (‘~say that~’) including historiography, social science, and novels, let alone, journalism. This chapter tackles the problems of reported speech in reporting the results of public opinion polling. Respondents in survey interviews provide temporarily constructed brief answers (e.g., ‘I agree,’ ‘I disagree,’ ‘consolidating the town’) by choosing certain options offered by interviewers vis-à-vis the questions framed by pollsters. What Americans hear or read in the media which constitute the major outlet of public opinion polling, however, is not those fragmentary pieces of answers and questions. Rather, what is presented as public opinion in the news media is something different from the original utterances. With this respect, this chapter seeks to analyze the communicative features, especially, the grammatical structures deployed in reporting opinion polling by making comparisons with the ways in which the term ‘public opinion’ is used, when the meaning of ‘public opinion’ is not saturated with opinion polling. Before undertaking such

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analyses, this chapter sketches historical-communicative relationships between public opinion and the mass media.

5.2. HISTORICAL RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN PUBLIC OPINION AND MEDIA Understandings of public opinion are intricately intertwined with the ways in which various ideal-types of the news media are constituted. Although the current political communication research tends to treat the media and public opinion as two isolated entities, specifically when political communication research concerns how ‘the media’ affect ‘public opinion,’ the relationship between the media and public opinion is far more complex and variant than the causality model depicts. In that regard, this section discusses the three constitutional models of public opinion –delegation, mobilization, and observation -- in relation to the ways in which the media function in political communication.

5.2.1. Delegation: Media as Public Surveillance  The delegation model of public opinion is centered on the institutional designs of the government, especially, on the legislature as the privileged institutional body reflecting public opinion. As discussed in Chapter 2, in the delegation model, political representatives are formally authorized to speak on behalf of other people whom they represent, and among the governmental institutions the legislature has been configured as the organ of public opinion, in which laws are deemed to be implemented in accordance

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with the will of those represented. In the classical theories of public opinion, democratic laws should not be merely the rules governing people but essentially the consent of the governed communicated in mediation by the legislature. Accordingly, representatives are de jure considered as the reporter of the opinions of their constituents. However, there exist de facto problems of discrepancies between the opinions of those representing and those represented. Because the formal authorization (i.e., elections) itself is deemed to guarantee sameness between representing bodies and their constituents, representatives have no further obligation to speak in the form of reported speech (e.g., ‘People in my district say that~’) in the deliberative process of legislating public policies. Rather, they are the authors of the speech which is only theoretically, if not fictionally, attributable to the electoral constituents and, in practice, amounts, more often than not, to the collective voice of the political parties to which they belong. In order to complement the deficiencies of the delegation model, the early printing press, often metaphorically characterized as ‘the fourth estate’40 (Petley, 2009) or ‘watchdog,’ sought to function as a public surveillance system by exposing the governing bodies to the scrutinizing eyes of the public (Splichal, 2002). It was British philosopher and social reformist Jeremy Bentham who first elaborated the function of the press as the public surveillance system. For Bentham (1791), the public constitutes the infallible ‘superintendence’ over all other branches of the government including the judiciary and the legislature, and, thus, ‘the public compose a tribunal, which is more powerful than all 40

Edmund Burke is credited with using the expression ‘fourth estate’ metaphorically characterized journalism as an independent estate in the British Parliament which consisted of three estates at that time– crown, nobility and commons. That is, journalism as the fourth estate is not a governmental body distinct from the executive, legislative and judiciary bodies. Rather, journalism was or has been conceived as a civil institution watching over the conduct of representatives.

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the other tribunals’ (p.29). Rather than the public appeal to the government for their betterment of life, the government must appeal to the public for its political legitimacy. In order to ‘constrain the members of the assembly to perform their duty’ (p.29) and to ‘secure the confidence of the people’ (p.30), Bentham suggested utilizing the law of ‘publicity’ which he applied to the modern prison system famously called the ‘panopticon’ (Foucault, 1979). Just as the watch tower located at the center of prison cells disciplines prisoners by virtue of transparent visibility of inmates’ behaviors, Bentham envisioned that the free press should function as the political panopticon through which legislators are exposed to the public opinion tribunal. Just as the mere fact that prisoners are exposed to the panopticon-- irrespective of whether or not a watcher really pays attention to individual cells, -- leads prisoners to correct themselves, public visibility through the press makes self-interested legislators speak in a public spirit, regardless whether the public peruse newspapers or never bother to do so. Thus, even though public opinion itself might be fictitious or imaginary, because the people who comprise the public are largely ignorant of public affairs and uninterested in politics, the imaginary public opinion tribunal embodied by the free press still effectively functions as a watchdog for those people (Cutler, 1999). Thus, it is no wonder that, until the end of 19th century, publication of parliamentary proceedings occupied a central place in the British press (Chalaby, 1998). While the public tribunal model became less popular alongside the rise of professional journalism in the 20th century, the sense of surveillance of politicians persists. Arguably, the American cable channel, C-SPAN (Cable Satellite Public Affairs Network),

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despite its low viewer ratings, is still operating on the basis of this model. Two channels of C-SPAN are devoted mainly to covering proceedings in Congress; C-SPAN provides coverage of the House of Representatives, while C-SPAN2 covers the Senate. Notably, both C-SPAN channels, without commentaries or interpretations of journalists, provide live broadcasts of how representatives of the American people deliberate at the Capitol Hill. To put it differently, C-SPAN functioning as an impersonal surveillance camera exposes politicians to the imaginary public tribunal.

   

5.2.2. Mobilization: Media as the Organizer of Public Opinion  The mobilization model of public opinion is fused with religious movements, and

the media in this model are viewed as an organ that builds up local or national groups. As we can observe in the First Amendment, the freedom of speech and the press is formulated in tandem with ‘an establishment of religion’ and ‘the right of people peacefully to assemble and to petition.’ To the American founding fathers, especially, to the anti-federalists, freedom of the press was more about forming collective political opinions against legal despotism than competing in a free marketplace of ideas (Manin, 1997). As long as people are the master of the government and the government is merely a servant of the people, ordinary people have the right to ‘legislate at home’ or ‘outside the door’ of the legislature (Wood, 1972). Some radical Whigs even argued that ‘the right and force of the national voice’ must be communicated to the legislature in the speech form of ‘instructions’ instead of ‘petitions’ (ibid, p.371), because the right of people was no longer granted by the Crown.

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As Marvin and Simonson (2004) aptly describe it, ‘congregational communication’ was the defining feature of 19th-century politics. But the repertoire of congregational communication is not limited to ‘bodily mass communication,’ the immediate assembly of large groups in proximity such as frantic local crowds in public squares, election rituals and voluntary associations. On the one hand, voluntary associations were mostly local chapters of state-level or national-level organizations. Skocpol (2003) documents that American civic voluntarism in the 19th century was already large-scale: ‘classic American voluntary federations, including fraternal groups, transcended primary solidarities among family members, neighbors, and friends’ (p.85). Newspapers and other forms of periodicals (i.e., newsletters) in this regard connected local associations with the center organization. This is where Alexis de Tocqueville (1840, p.112), observing American civic voluntarism, posited that “newspapers make associations, and associations make newspapers.” In order to be influential, civic associations had to appeal to a large number of ordinary citizens to mobilize them into their organization, whereas today’s interest groups consist of professionals and rest on lobbies (Skocpol, 2003). Thus, the number of newspapers at that time was proportional to the number of associations, not to the number of readers (Tocqueville, 1840). Civic associations and newspapers were mutually constitutive. In this respect, it is interesting that the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde (1901), by associating modern newspapers with public (mass) rather than Le Bon’s foule (crowd) (Moscovici, 1985), also saw that a newspaper is a species of ‘public letters’ whose historical origin can be traced back to St. Paul’s epistles addressed to the early Greco-Roman Christian congregations (ekklesia).

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Beyond Bentham’s characterization of media as an imaginary institution of public tribunal, Tarde goes further to say that newspapers, having evolved from epistolary correspondence, serve ‘the grandiose unification of public mind.’ On the other hand, political parties played a key role in organizing public opinion. Unlike civic associations operated on the basis of membership, for political parties, psychological identification rather than embodied participation was dominant. According to Altschuler and Blumin (2000), Americans showed low attendance at party meetings, caucuses and conventions, and even when they attended at all, they were spectators rather than participants. While the parties never gave up the efforts to expand memberships, they also worked together with the press in mobilizing voters, giving rise to so-called ‘partisan journalism’ (Starr, 2004; McGerr, 1986). The parties assumed a major role in guiding newspapers as well as financially subsidizing editors, and the editors of newspapers propagated heavily partisan and ideological editorials. For instance, Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune, who hired Karl Marx as a European correspondent, professed his affiliation with the Whig and Republican parties, and actively wrote editorials about anti-slavery, women’s rights and socialist movements (Schudson, 1998). Russian socialists were not far behind their American contemporaries. Rebutting the claims of membership-based party organization and the skepticism that it is not ‘a newspaper that can create a party organization,’ Vladimir Lenin (1902) formulated that a newspaper is not only a ‘collective propagandist’ and a ‘collective agitator’ but also a ‘collective organizer’ by bringing unity to ‘all Russians,’ which later became the editorial doctrines of the Pravda.

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The most distinctive linguistic feature of mediated congregational communication lies in the ways in which the deixis We is used. As Benveniste (1971. p.202) notes, the We is not a plurality of the I. Rather, the We expresses speaker I’s relationships with others, serving as ‘a junction between I and non-I.’ Especially, the I-other relationship expressed by the We depends on whether the We includes the addressees (inclusive We: ‘Let’s have lunch together’), or the other parties excluding the addressees (exclusive We: ‘We already had lunch without you’). In political communication, a classic example of the exclusive We is the ‘royal We’ whereby king and God are encoded as one person visà-vis his subjects. The counterpart of the royal We is the We of petitioners who supplicate civil liberty to their majesty. When the preamble of the U.S. Constitution was drafted, some anti-federalists opposed ‘the expression, We, the people, instead of the States of America,’ because it is not ‘a compact between Prince and people’ (Wootton ed., 2003. p.25). Purportedly, reading the draft, anti-federalists were reminiscent of the Petition of Rights of 1682 and took the We as necessarily presupposing the existence of the king to whom the voice of the We -- people exclusive of the king-- was addressed. The U.S. Constitution, however, paved a new way of languaging41 the We in political communication in that virtually everybody is included in the category of people, although empirically it took more than one century for women and African-Americans to acquire legal entitlement to it. At any rate, nineteenth-century political journalism invented another type of the inclusive We – the ‘editorial We’ (Mühlhäusler & Harré,1990). Sometimes, the editorial We is regarded as an instance of the exclusive We, something 41

Warner (1990) points out that the written constitution is an American innovation and that the We represents the popular authorship of the Constitution.

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similar to the royal We, on the ground that the editors themselves were publishers assuming the role of spokesperson for their own newspaper. Although it may be true that the editorial voice in the anonymous mode represents media institution’s opinion, the editorial We should not be equated with the We employed by customer service representatives through whom a corporate body becomes present. The essential component of the editorial We is that, as in the case of the U.S. Constitution, it virtually includes an indefinite number of audiences to whom the editorial voice is synchronically addressed, and the editorial We, by virtue of its publicity, invokes individual audiences’ identification with the voice of people, not editors’ personal voice. Tocqueville’s observation shows the point clearly: “A newspaper represents an association: it may be said to address each of its readers in the name of all the others” (Tocqueville, 1840. p.114). That is, the editorial We encodes people as a unified virtual entity to whom the editorial voice is addressed, and, in turn, addresses the editorial voice as the voice of people in entirety (or public opinion) to empirical audiences.42

 

5.2.3. Observation: Media as the Reporter of Public Opinion  Professional journalism, at least since the 1920s, has embraced the objectivity

norm (Schudson, 2001) that journalists must take neutral and impartial stances resembling those of scientific observers (Peters, 2005). The primary role of journalism is to circulate information about social events and other people existing outside the media, 42

The editorial We should not be treated as a byproduct of print technology in general. The editorial We is not a sub-class of the authorial We but a different species. An author of a book may say ‘We shall see how human beings have evolved from physical particles’ and, in that case, the authorial We only annexes the author and empirical readers. In contrast, when a newspaper editorial says ‘We must thwart any terrorist attempts,’ the editorial We include all people, not just the empirical readers.

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not propagating their own arguments in order to organize people in the name of public opinion encoded with the editorial We. Moreover, the sense of surveillance that was pervasive in the Benthamian model became more epistemological than political. Instead of functioning as the fourth estate, public tribunal or social panopticon, journalism is conceived to be a social observatory which gleans information about people not for the purpose of policing and disciplining them but for the purpose of producing factual knowledge about them. Thus, when Harold Lasswell (1948) posited the ‘surveillance of environment’ as one of the three functions of the media, the word ‘surveillance’ bears the meaning of ‘understanding’ or ‘reducing uncertainty’ almost synonymously with social ‘surveys.’ Professional journalism is linked to, at least, two distinctive communicative practices. First, working in a newsroom psychologically as well as physically detached from the editorial office, ‘reporters’ document events and affairs in the social world and recount them in the discursive form of factual information instead of argumentative editorials. As laboratory scientists have relied on ‘a parajuridical metaphor: credible, trustworthy, well-to-do witness gathered at the scene of the action’ (Latour, 1993. p.18), credibility and trustworthiness are underlined as the professional code in journalism schools, and producing the sense of ‘eyewitnessing’ (Zelizer, 2007) in this regard is a key to ensuring journalistic authority. Linguistically, eyewitness involves the standardized prose consisting of the 5Ws and 1H and the uses of third-personal accounts in which the personal voice of reporters is inhibited. In contrast to the anonymous editorials in which the voice of editors is embedded, the byline positioned outside the news story reveals the

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reporters’ proper name as the witness. Technologically, illustrations, photographs, and electronic live coverage (cf. Barnhurst & Nerone, 2001) have increasingly played a central role in producing the sense of eyewitnessing. By virtue of technological mediation that induces visual presence and temporal immediacy of the events, the individuality of reporters as interpreter and storyteller is further neutralized. Second, professional journalism became a vast institution of reported speech. In other words, American journalists quote other people’s voice as news instead of inserting their own voice, and quotation marks now constitute one of the most preeminent linguistic styles of journalistic discourse. As early as 1881, Charles Warner, editor of a Connecticut-based newspaper remarked:

The editor does not expect to form public opinion so much by arguments and appeals as by the news he presents and his manner of presenting it, by the iteration of an idea until it becomes familiar, by the reading-matter selected by the quotation of opinion as news, and not professedly to influence the reader. (cited from McGerr, 1986. p.112. Italics added)

While political journalists began to use quotation marks in the latter 19th century, their quotation of others’ speech was based on informal conversations (Schudson, 1994). It is through the invention of journalistic interviews that reported speech became established as a genre in the news media (Clayman & Heritage, 2002). As in the case of survey interviews examined in Chapter 3, journalistic interviews show a sequential organization consisting of question-answer-acknowledgement, which implies that journalists lead the process of interaction and decide the content to be published. In addition, unlike survey

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interviews, journalistic interviews entail absent third-parties, namely, audiences, and when the interviewees reply, their speech is addressed to audiences as well as reporters. Professional journalism views public opinion as social affairs existing extraneously to journalistic institutions rather than a published editorial opinion intrinsic to them. ‘The journalistic fallacy,’ argues Allport (1937. p.12), lies in the ‘illusion that the item which one sees represented in print as public opinion.’ Public opinion should be observed, recorded and reported in the form of reported speech as belonging to other people. But the problem is relating to how. How can a reporter eyewitness what the public speaks? How can journalists interview the public in entirety, not just a privileged segment of them? This is where opinion polling helps journalists report public opinion as news. On the one hand, opinion polling itself is a sort of social event occurring extraneously to journalism, and journalists can make reportage of it. When making news of public opinion, journalists cover the process through which pollsters make public opinion observable and reportable. On the other hand, the poll data enables journalists to construct a reported speech, notably, characterized by the propositional subordinate ‘that’ instead of a direct speech beginning with the editorial We. That is, the poll data mediates public opinion that can be quoted. Reporting public opinion polling is a ‘doubly objectifying social force’ (Alexander, 2006), not only because social scientific objectivity in polling is coupled with the journalistic norm of objectivity, but also because journalistic witnessing of polling events is amalgamated with the reported speech of public opinion.

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5.3. METHOD: ANAYSIS OF GRAMMATICAL FRAMES In order to explore how the term ‘public opinion’ is language, in general, and how opinion polling is reported, in particular, this chapter employs an analysis of grammatical frames as the methodology. The significance of the linguistic analysis lies in the fact that language is not merely a representation but a constituent of social realities, because language mediates human minds and the outer worlds by encoding and classifying them. As Kress and Hodge (1979, p.63; see also Fowler, Hodge, Kress & Trew, 1979) argues in support of Benjamin Whorf (1966), language provides ‘the major access for individuals into the classification system of their society,’ and, therefore, ‘the analysis of language provides the easiest way into an analysis of that system.’ For example, when an audiophile says ‘these headphones have very warm sounds,’ the word ‘warm’ does not represent his subjective feelings of temperature. If we approach language from the representational notion, the utterance above is nothing but a non-sequitur. However, when the audiophile utters the sentence, he does not intend to mean a rise in ambient temperature. Rather, he intends to communicate and share his acoustic experiences (e.g., experiences of protruding low frequencies in the sound balance43) in the expectations that his language is understandable by others, and in so doing, the audiophile and his fellow conversant, once the language is successfully understood, establish a new social fact which, existing in-between communicating people, can neither be deduced from nor reduced to private mental states. In other words, social reality established in 43

Even the ‘protruding low frequencies,’ though these terminologies seemingly appear to be more neutral and scientific, are not what one directly experiences. The phrase ‘heavy low frequencies’ is also a social fact created out of visual experiences with the instruments measuring sound waves. It is common in science and engineering to visualize acoustic phenomena.

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communication is independent of individual minds.44 This becomes more apparent, when we consider that ‘bright sound’ is preferred to ‘cold sound’ as the opposite of ‘warm sound’45 How can ‘warm’ and ‘bright’ be contrasted as antonyms? No other explanation except social conventionalism seems to provide a plausible account, because the contrast between ‘warm’ and ‘bright’ is purely arbitrary and may vary contingent upon the groups, communities or societies formed though regular communications. The ‘grammar’ in this context can be seen as the communicative conventions or, more precisely, communicative patterns which constitute an integral part of social realities within a given community. Grammar is not merely a syntactic rule or code, but a collective semantic phenomenon. From the standpoint of formal linguistics, the two sentences ‘These headphones have cold sounds’ and ‘These headphones have bright sounds’ share the same grammatical structure consisting of {pronoun + noun + verb + adjective + noun}, and the difference between ‘cold’ and ‘bright’ is just a matter of the creative choice of individual speakers. However, in real life, the choice of the word ‘bright’ over ‘cold’ is

44

Controversies over the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis (Whorf, 1966) concern the extent to which language affects individual minds. A strong version of the hypothesis argues that language determines perceptions and thoughts, and that different languages imprint different realities onto individual minds, which is often dubbed as ‘cultural relativism.’ Critics (e.g., Pinker, 2000) of the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis have argued that perceptions are independent of languages on the ground that language can be translated from one to another, and that animals which do not have a language still have capacities to think and perceive. For the critics, thus, language is a representation of pre-formed perceptions and thoughts. As my example shows, the dialogic notion of language differs from both (see Linell, 2009). First, it is undeniable that pre-linguistic thoughts exist. In the example above, feeling a certain type of sound is not determined by language. However, language is not a representation of these pre-linguistic thoughts. Saying that the sound is ‘warm’ is foremost a communicative action that exposes one’s pre-linguistic private experiences to the perspective of others. That is, languaging presupposes two kinds of otherness – one is the existence of the other people spoken to, and the other is the language exogenous to one’s pre-linguistic thinking. Second, social realities established in collaboration with others reflexively affect our perceptions. But this does not mean that language mechanically and/or unconsciously changes and determines the nature of pre-linguistic perceptions and thoughts. What language accomplishes is that it enables us to think self-reflexively about those pre-linguistic experiences by taking a socio-communicative perspective (Archer, 2003). 45 Ample examples can be found from an online community of audiophiles (http://www.head-fi.org).

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not an individual choice, since the word ‘bright’ is more appropriate for a successful communication to a certain group of people. Therefore, an analysis of grammatical frames, which can be generally defined as ‘the systematic account of all the principles governing choices of words and sequences of words’ (Toolan, 1988. p.112), ultimately concerns ‘not language, but communication’ as ‘the frame of reference within which the place of language in culture and society is to be described’ (Hymes, 1964. p.3). In particular, an analysis of grammatical frames in journalism is not limited to an explicit account of formal structures per se. Rather, states van Dijk (1988, p.2), news is a ‘complex communicative event that also embodies a social context, featuring participants (and their properties) as well as production and reception processes.’ In other words, we need to approach the grammatical frames in news as a way of investigating how the news is geared to social changes and how journalists as communicators play a role in that process. As Zelizer (2004, p.111) notes, the examination of the languages of journalism has been ‘a relatively novel phenomenon in the world of inquiry into journalism,’ even though language plays a central role in journalism. Even though various approaches such as ‘rhetoric,’ ‘(critical) discourse analysis,’ ‘discursive psychology,’ ‘sociolinguistics,’ ‘ethnography of communication’ and ‘narrative analysis’ have not yet formed a coherent methodological apparatus in journalism studies, we can draw on a few components useful for an analysis of grammars in communicating about public opinion in journalism.

Lexicons  

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Lexicon (van Valin, 2001) refers to single vocabularies, and dictionaries like the Oxford English Dictionary register a whole gamut of lexicons and provide meanings along with their etymologies, synonyms, antonyms and homonyms. A lexical analysis is a process of identifying each lexicon’s meanings, referents, etymologies, synonyms, antonyms and so on. However, unlike the dictionaries which register lexicons severed from actual communications, a lexical analysis here must undertake to find those elements intrinsic to the textual bodies used in communication. As we have seen, the lexicons ‘warm’ and ‘bright’ become antonyms within the context of audiophile communities, and their relationship cannot be pre-determined by dictionaries. Similarly, a lexical analysis of ‘public opinion’ involves exploring the ways in which the term ‘public opinion’ is defined, referred to and forms relationships with other terms as synonyms or antonyms within journalistic discourse.

Semantic Roles  

Semantic roles, also known as ‘transitivity’ (Fowler, Hodge, Kress & Trew, 1979), because the roles are specified by transitive verbs, concern how actively or passively agency is enacted and represented in language (Duranti, 2004). In terms of syntax, an entity taking the subject position in a sentence is expressed as the author of actions specified by the verb phrase, and, especially when the verb is transitive, the entity performs a certain action directed to another entity positioned as the object. In the following sentence, ‘John sells this car,’ John is the author of the verb ‘sells,’ and ‘this car’ is the object to which John’s action is directed. While the composition of the syntax

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itself expresses such agency, the options for syntactic composition are semantically constrained, and the semantic constraints are culturally and/or historically variable. For example, the sentence ‘This car sells John,’ albeit its syntactic possibility, sounds nonsensical, because an inanimate thing performs an action only attributable to a human agent. In contrast, ‘This car sells well,’ where an inanimate entity is the subject of the same verb ‘sells,’ makes good sense. 46 Even though every English speaker may well know that a car is sold by a salesperson, human agency accountable for selling a car in this case is obscured, because, presumably, the selling point is not the salesperson’s verbal skills but special properties, say, low gasoline consumption, of the car. Semantic roles of the noun phrase, thus, are interlocked with the verb phrase. On the one hand, as in the case of ‘A car sells John,’ certain nouns semantically preclude certain verbs as their predicates. On the other hand, the verb phrase provides a character to an entity represented by the noun phrase, and there is a hierarchy of agency in accordance with the verb phrase. In terms of the hierarchy (van Valin, 2001), an entity (‘actor’) entailing the active verbs such as ‘kill,’ ‘destroy,’ ‘summon,’ and ‘command’ ranks higher than another entity (‘experiencer’) predicated by the cognitive-perceptive-emotive verbs such as ‘think,’ ‘see’ and ‘love,’ and ranks one further step higher than the one (‘recipient’) specified by the passive verbs such as ‘sent to,’ ‘heard by’ and ‘struck by.’

46

This case is called ‘ergative’ or ‘ergative-absolutive’ by linguists. In the ergative case, the object of transitive verbs (e.g., ‘We sell this car well’) becomes the subject of intransitive verbs (e.g., ‘This car sells well’). Anthropologist Duranti (1994) found that in Fono (a village in Western Samoa) political language is frequently structured by ergative frames, when ‘the unquestionable power of the deity and the polity who exist outside of here and now’ is opposed to ‘social actors who behave and act within historical time’ (p.126).

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As Duranti (1994) points out, journalistic discourse in the U.S. is full of sentences in which a non-human entity is placed in the subject position of a transitive clause with a predicate that entails properties associated with human beings (e.g., ‘A huge falling tree injured 20 people at Disneyland’), and this style tends to result in ‘mitigation of [human] agency’ by reporting the event as an accident. But this style is not a universal feature generalizable to all types of journalism. Quite distinct from objective journalism, investigative journalism seeks to ‘investigate’ and reveal, rather than ‘report,’ human responsibility (e.g., Disneyland CEO’s decision to cutback his gardening crews) that might lurk underneath such an accident. Hence, a systematic inquiry into the ways in which agency is framed in conjunction with the hierarchy of semantic roles assigned to human and non-human entities will contribute to a comparative study, whether crosscultural or historical, as to how various versions of journalism frame reality differently. Applied to journalistic discourse about public opinion, in particu lar, such an analysis will illustrate how the voice of people is positioned in the hierarchy of semantic roles – namely, whether public opinion is given a human agency, or languaged as a material entity, and whether public opinion is framed as an actor, experiencer or recipient.

Metaphors 

Whereas metaphors had been viewed as a poetic phenomenon since Aristotle, recent cognitive linguistics has revealed that metaphors are an integral part of our ordinary conceptual systems (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), and prevalent in any linguistic genres including science, law, philosophy, and journalism as well as literature. What is

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still missing in the cognitive notion, however, is how and why people choose or create certain metaphors in their actual uses (Steen, 2007). That is, metaphors should be empirically analyzed in light of theirs concrete usages in communication rather than from a priori speculations. Metaphor refers to an importation of meaning from one domain to another, and the basic syntax of metaphor is explicitly or implicitly composed of {target domain + copula + source domain}. For instance, in the sentence, ‘Life is a journey,’ the target domain is ‘life’ and the source domain is ‘journey.’ A central issue here is how ‘life’ and ‘journey’ are linked by the copula ‘is,’ which equates two radically different entities. Cognitive linguists have explained that there are some pre-existing cognitive commonalities between the two, and, in this example, both words implicate moving from a starting point to a destination. But this is, at best, a post-hoc explanation. Namely, cognitive linguists extract a commonality, once a metaphor is already uttered, and fail to explain why people make certain metaphors. Starkly difficult from which to extract such a commonality are the hidden metaphors, such as; ‘The genes instruct us to be selfish.’ Here, it is very hard to figure out a commonality between genes and university instructors. An alternative explanation is that, on the one hand, metaphors are fundamentally a communicative device with which a speaker posits his private world as something comprehensible and accessible by the addressees, and on the other hand, source domain reflects communicative intentions specially designed for those addressees. In other words, the source domain is constrained by the expectations about others’ understandings of the metaphoric composition. The source domain of ‘life’ can be a ‘journey,’ ‘narrative,’

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‘jigsaw puzzle,’ ‘race,’ ‘battle’ ad infinitum depending on where a speaker is communicatively situated,47 and, if there is a commonality between target domain and source domain, it is created in the process of communication.48 Seen this way, an analysis of metaphors of public opinion concern neither what are journalists’ subjective views on public opinion (e.g., Herbst, 1998) nor literary figurative styles (e.g.,Back, 1988), but how journalism as a speech community communicates public opinion to audiences irrespective of their subjective conceptions, and how different metaphors are connected to different journalistic practices.

Quotation Styles  

Quotation styles constitute an important linguistic device relating to delivering others’ voice. From the logical-positive standpoint of language, quotation styles do not matter, since direct quotations (e.g., ‘Dawkins said “The genes instruct us to be selfish”’) and indirect quotations (e.g., ‘Dawkins said that the genes instruct us to be selfish’) express the same semantic content, as long as the two truth values – ‘Dawkins said something’ and ‘The genes instruct us to be selfish’ – remain unchanged. From the communicative standpoint which situates those statements in-between communicating people, the two quotation styles express speaker’s different attitudes toward the quoted speech. The direct style imitates or presents the utterances in the context of a speech event, whereas the indirect style interprets and analyzes the utterances in the context of a

47

According to a survey, those who make less than $35,000 per year are three times more likely to say that life is ‘battle’ (http://www.pollster.com/blogs/life_metaphors.php?nr=1). 48 Poetic notion of metaphors is thus not unwarranted in that metaphor is a creation of new meanings.

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reporting event (Lucy, 1993; Hickmann, 1993). The difference becomes more conspicuous, when the personal deixis are considered. The direct style allows a firstpersonal account of the person quoted (e.g., ‘Dawkins said “I believe the genes instruct us to be selfish”’), while the indirect style takes a third-personal point of view (e.g., ‘Dawkins said that he believe that the genes instruct us to be selfish’). In short, the direct style is communicational, and the indirect style is observational (Banfield, 1993). As noted, journalism is a remarkable institution of reported speech, and an analysis of quotation styles helps us understand which perspectives are provided and which stances journalists take in reporting others’ speech. When journalists take the stance of the distant observer, indirect quotations might be preferred, and a first person view of the reported voice would be disabled. Conversely, when journalists take the role of the communicative participant as in journalistic interviews, direction quotations would be dominant. Public opinion, here, is an instance of such communication styles, especially, regarding how public opinion is quoted.

Data Set 

The following sections will empirically track how the historical changes in the models of public opinion – namely, delegation, mobilization and observation—are linked to journalism, and how such changes are encoded by the grammatical frames in relation to the ways in which journalists communicate public opinion. The corpus for the analyses is the articles of the New York Times for 110 years (1896-2005), which can be electronically retrieved through the ProQuest Historical Service. This study involves two

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steps. The first step consists of keyword searches for ‘public opinion’ and ‘poll’ with all of the articles available, which will show a global picture of their relative distributions and mutual relationships over time. The second step is an in-depth analysis of the grammatical frames with 297 randomly chosen articles -- 197 articles containing the term ‘public opinion’ (1896-1965) and 100 articles reporting opinion polls (1936-2005). The unit of analysis, here, is articles rather than sentences, because a lengthy article could be overrepresented, if the unit of analysis is a single sentence.

5.4. CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF PUBLIC OPINION: AN OVERVIEW In 1987, Philip Converse (1987. p.S13), a notable academic pollster, argued that opinion polling had a major impact not only on the understanding of detailed properties and dynamics of public opinion reflected in the poll data, but also on “the conceptions which all of us hold—politicians, scholar, and citizen alike—as to what ‘public opinion’ is best taken to mean.” Refuting Blumer’s (1948) criticism of opinion polling that public opinion is a collective action, not the aggregate of individual private opinions, and thus, that opinion polling is measuring merely non-public opinion, Converse, in the 50th anniversary issue of the Public Opinion Quarterly that squarely declared ‘Blumer was wrong!,’ claimed from four decade hindsight that opinion polling had changed the very conceptions of public opinion. By ‘changing conceptions of public opinion,’ Converse did not mean the decline of collective actions performed by political parties, interest groups and grassroots civic organizations in the political process, nor displacement of

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collective actions with opinion polling (see also Converse, 1996). What Converse observed in 1987 is the ‘growing acceptance’ of opinion polls as symbolic forms among American people, especially among the political elites including politicians, campaign advisors and political journalists. Characterizing the Blumerian view of public opinion as ‘antiquarian,’ Converse states;

it is ironic that it is exactly this kind of “one person, one vote” tally of opinions as routinely reported today by polls and surveys which has now become the consensual understanding the world around as to baseline definition of public opinion. (P. Converse, 1987. p.S14. Italics added)

In this quotation, Converse suggests that the historical change of public opinion should be found in changes in social definitions or ‘social representations’ (Moscovici, 2001) which shape reality in certain ways rather than in changes in sociological reality which gives rise to mental or ‘epistemic representations.’ Namely, the reality of public opinion lies in the common sense knowledge and common language whereby American people communicate with respect to public opinion in real life rather than in American people’s certain actions corresponding to a predetermined and fixed set of categories. Converse’s arguments, in this sense, can be regarded as the manifestation of a recent shift in American political culture in which opinion polling constitutes a new reality of public opinion. From the standpoint of social representations that Converse implicitly takes up, therefore, sociologic critics of opinion polling since Blumer (e.g., Lang, 2008; Salmon & Glasser, 1995; Ginsberg, 1986) often misfire. If one sees opinion polling as an epistemic representation, that is, in terms of scientific knowledge, opinion polling might be viewed 184

as fatally flawed in capturing the sociological reality of public opinion in the sense that, whilst public opinion is formed and publicly staged through conversations and collective actions, opinion polling merely measures private opinions severed from those sociological processes. However, when opinion polling is viewed as a social representation, namely as a symbolic token publicly available between communicating people, the problem is not concerned with the epistemological judgment of whether ‘Blumer was wrong’ or ‘Blumer was right’ but with the communicative process in which opinion polling gains primacy in American political culture and enables talking about public opinion to take place in certain ways by providing new languages and grammars. In this context, the following figures present an overview of the extent to which public ‘opinion polling’ has become increasingly prominent in the American news media, while the usage of the umbrella concept ‘public opinion’ simultaneously has declined. To begin with, Figure 5.1 illustrates the total number of articles in which the two terms ‘public opinion’ and ‘poll’ were mentioned in the New York Times (NYT). As the graph shows, the uses of the term ‘public opinion’ culminated in the period 1926 to 1935 (N=7047 articles), and thereafter have declined steadfastly with 3957 articles from 1956 to 1965, and 3479 articles from 1986 to1995. In contrast, the usage of the term, ‘poll’ has increased since the 1930s. From 1936 to 1945, the NYT reported 1255 articles mentioning opinion polling, 859 articles from 1956 to 1965, and 1977 articles during 1986 to1995. What is noticeable here is that the increases of ‘poll’ occurred in three stages. The first stage is the invention of scientific opinion polling by Gallup, Crossley and Roper in

185

the mid-1930s. While the NYT reported straw polls before the mid-1930s, reporting straw polls was relatively a rarity. However, after the 1936 presidential election in which Gallup correctly predicted the election outcomes, opinion polling became more salient in the NYT, as the newspaper subscribed to the Gallup Poll as a regular purchaser of the poll data. At the initial stage of poll reporting, NYT journalists did not write comprehensive reports of opinion polls, although they often cited the press releases published by polling organizations. For comprehensive poll reports, articles were directly contributed by pollsters. Indeed, George Gallup himself authored 345 NYT articles, which amounts to 27% of all articles mentioning ‘poll’ at least once during the first decade of scientific opinion polling (1936-45). Interestingly, the usage of the term ‘public opinion’ began to diminish with the rise of opinion polling. As aforementioned, ‘public opinion’ received the greatest number of mentions during 1926-35, just before the advent of opinion polling in 1936. Whereas it would be an oversimplification to claim that the term ‘poll’ displaced ‘public opinion,’ it is at least undeniable that ‘poll’ started to be closely interrelated with ‘public opinion,’ and the usage of ‘public opinion’ not linked to ‘poll’ has decreased. The second stage is skepticism about opinion polling for nearly 20 years following the 1948 presidential election. When pollsters erroneously predicted the victory of Thomas Dewey over Harry Truman, the reputation of polling as well as the public image of social science suffered (Merton & Hatt, 1949). Politicians showed suspicion of the desirability of poll-driven leadership as well as on the accuracy of opinion polling. Truman wrote in his memoirs “I never paid any attention to the polls myself, because

186

Figure 5.1 Articles Mentioning ‘Public Opinion’ and ‘Poll’ (New York Times, 1896-2005)

8000 7047 

7000

6672  6000 5240 

5000

5026 

4000

3957  3385 

3894  3594 

3524 

3479 

3000 2719  2000

1899  1255 

1000

0

872  102 

111 

186 

859 

1127 

1977  1378 

243 

1896‐1905 1906‐1915 1916‐1925 1926‐1935 1936‐1945 1946‐1955 1956‐1965 1966‐1975 1976‐1985 1986‐1995 1996‐2005 Public Opinion Poll

187

in my judgment they did not represent a true cross section of American opinion” questioning, in another source, “What would Jesus Christ have preached if he’d taken a poll in Israel?” (Rottinghaus, 2003. p.326).49 Academic criticism on polling began to be voiced amidst the settlement of survey research at universities including Columbia, Princeton and Michigan (J. Converse, 1987). As previously noted, critics (e.g., Blumer, 1948; Boorstin, 1961) commonly assaulted the self-referentiality of opinion polling that public opinion is what opinion polling measures rather than an isolated object or a real reference existing before opinion polling is conducted. More importantly, the news media including the NYT began to withdraw their subscription to syndicated polls after 1948 (Bradburn & Sudman, 1988). Journalists were skeptical about the value of opinion polling, because inaccurate poll data could ruin their credibility. In this regard, Figure 5.1 shows that the number of NYT articles that mentioned the term ‘poll’ decreased from 1255 (1936-45) to 872 (1946-55) and 859 (1956-65). While Figure 5.1 shows about a 30% decrease in articles mentioning the word ‘poll’ throughout the whole text, Figure 5.2 which counts the number of headlines containing ‘poll’ shows journalists’ skepticism more forcefully; whereas 215 articles incorporated ‘poll’ in their headlines during 1936-45, the number of headlines plummeted to 25 (1946-55) and 48 (1956-65) in the ensuing two decades, showing about 85% diminution.

49

Despite Truman’s personal antagonism against polling, Rottinghaus (2003) points out, Truman’s White House occasionally consulted with pollsters on selected issues to adapt rhetorical strategies.

188

Figure 5.2 ‘Public Opinion’ and ‘Poll’ in the Headline (New York Times, 1896-2005) 800 700 600 500 400 300 200 100 0

Public Opinion

Poll

The third stage consists of pollsters’ efforts to promote scientific journalism followed by the implementation of in-house opinion polling in the mid-1960s and 1970s. Presidential candidates began to employ pollsters to develop election campaign strategies. John F. Kennedy who symbolizes the start of the era of ‘media politics’ thanks to his soaring popularity after the televised presidential debates in 1960 was the first to employ pollsters –Louis Harris – on his campaign team (Moore, 1995). The Watergate scandal in the early 1970s was also a boon to pollsters. Concerning Richard Nixon’s impeachment,

189

‘the battle of the polls’ (Lang & Lang, 1983) which finally showed more favorable results towards the congressional impeachment were believed to play a decisive role in leading Nixon to announce his resignation.50 In the meantime, pollsters invited journalists to their laboratory and sought to persuade them to follow the model of quantitative social science in reporting public opinion. Recollecting his personal experience with the reporters of the New York Times in covering public opinion in regional districts, Converse portrays how journalists discarded punditry reporting in favor of opinion polling.

For a number of national elections prior to the 1960s, the New York Times coverage of the campaign period hinged on an army of stringers about the land ...... The coverage format was not just punditry. Summing as it did over the best pundits in each district, this was super-punditry! Sometime around 1960, a high-level delegation from the Times came to visit us and our election studies in Ann Arbor. Some clever Times staffers had decided to review all past elections in this format, comparing final stringer predictions against the actual vote divisions … Pundit news, they had concluded, was not fit to print. (Converse, 1996. p.652)

While journalists reported opinion polls to a larger degree in the late 1960s, they continued to rely on syndicated polls, and poll reports in this form were still subject to criticism. Here, the congressional hearings on public opinion polls held in 1972 (transcribed in Committee on House Administration, 1973), an event rarely discussed in the history of opinion polling, deserve closer attention. The focus of the hearings at which 50

In a contrasting case, the polls are said to have saved Bill Clinton from the pressure of impeachment at the time of the Monica Lewinsky’s scandal. Media polls showed Clinton’s high popularity, in particular, regarding his economic job performance, and that was enough to give the impression of the legitimacy of Clinton’s presidency (Zaller, 1998).

190

renowned pollsters such as Gallup, Cantril, Harris, Roper and Yankelovich were present to testify before Congress was not on the accuracy of polling per se but on the quality of poll reports in the news media. One of the members of the House of Representatives stated, Mr. Frenzel: Doctor, I am not so interested in whether the polls are statistically correct. I am sure literally anybody can make a poll, make it correct, and get a statistical sample that serves his or her needs and predict what its accuracy is. What bothers me is how the questions are asked and how the samples are described to the people to whom the polls are broadcast (ibid, p. 10). In response, pollsters, while defending their own operations of opinion polling, attributed the problems mainly to reporting of the privately conducted polls commissioned by politicians and interest groups, and asked for self-regulation instead of government regulation to rectify the problems. For instance, saying “most of the problems arise from rather inadequately conducted polls which are reported alongside those which are painstakingly conducted as though there were no difference between them,” Louis Harris argued “regulation must be self-regulation rather than congressional legislation” (ibid, p.63). In the aftermath, the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) adopted ethical codes in publishing polls, which were originally drafted in the congressional bill requiring public disclosure of the commissioner of the polls, sampling methods, sample sizes, the questions etc., and journalism scholars started to conduct research on how faithfully the codes were preserved by the news media. A more systematic effort called ‘precision journalism’ movement was made in the early 1970s (Gollin, 1980; Herbst, 1993). Academic pollsters based in journalism schools 191

taught journalists to abandon the philosophers’ arm chair and learn the language of social science, stressing the historical affinity between journalism and social science in representing reality (e.g., Weaver & McCombs, 1980). Furthermore, pollsters argued that merely reporting the poll data does not warrant the scientific accuracy comparable to social science. Rather, they urged the incorporation of pollsters in the newsroom. Although CBS already pioneered media polling by hiring Warren Mitofsky in 1967 (Moore, 1995), it was not until the Watergate scandal of 1974 that newspapers and television networks in partnership instituted in-house media polling (Lang & Lang, 1983).51 Especially, the paragon of media polling was the partnership between the New York Times and CBS established in 1975. As such, on the one hand, news values, especially ‘timeliness’ (Crespi, 1980) helped determine poll questions and poll dates, and, on the other hand, pollsters’ scientific languages pervaded news articles in reporting public opinion. Figure 5.1 and Figure 5.2, in light of the discussion so far, show that the usage of the term ‘poll’ in NYT gained a boost in the wake of the implementation of in-house media polling. According to Figure 5.1, the number of articles mentioning ‘poll’ rises from 859 (1956-65) through 1127 (1966-75) to 1899 (1976-85). Figure 5.2 shows that the number of headlines containing the word ‘poll’ soared from 48 (1956-65) to 694 (196675), even though the appearance of ‘poll’ in headlines tends to decline thereafter. Besides, Figure 5.2 also displays that the usage of ‘public opinion’ in headlines has become 51

The proliferation of telephones in the United States facilitated the institution of media polling, because telephone interviews are more economical than face-to-face personal interviews. However, telephones which may constitute the infrastructure of opinion polling cannot be seen as the major driving force leading to in-house media polling, as Asher (1988) asserts. In-house media polling is unique to the United States, while telephones are globally distributed.

192

meager eclipsed by the term ‘poll.’ Figure 5.3 suggests that poll reporting has become increasingly salient on the front pages since the mid-1960s. That is, before the mid-1960s, poll results were only sporadically printed on the front pages, whereas the polls are nowadays considered to have greater news values than before the mid-1960s. What is remarkable in Figure 5.3 (see also Figure 5.1) is that the appearance of ‘public opinion’ has become closely correlated with that of ‘poll’ since the mid-1960s going up and down corresponding to the up and down of the ‘polls,’ which implies, as Converse claimed, that public opinion now mainly refers to opinion polling. Lastly, Figure 5.4 illustrates the number of editorials that mentioned ‘public opinion’ and ‘poll.’ As Figure 5.4 shows, mentions of ‘public opinion’ have straightforwardly declined since the late nineteenth century. While 1482 NYT editorials mentioned ‘public opinion’ during 1896-1905, only 210 editorials mentioned it 100 years later (1996-2005). Even the institution of opinion polling did not change the general pattern; at most, 142 editorials mentioned ‘poll’ for ten years (1986-95). Overall, this suggests that public opinion has become a matter of fact, namely, news rather than editorial arguments.

193

Figure 5.3 ‘Public Opinion’ and ‘Poll’ on the Front Page (New York Times, 1896-2005) 1400

1200

1000

800

600

400

200

0

Public Opinion

194

Poll

Figure 5.4 ‘Public Opinion’ and ‘Poll’ in Editorials (New York Times, 1896-2005) 1600

1400

1200

1000

800

600

400

200

0

Public Opinion

195

Poll

To summarize, we can draw, at least, four tentative conclusions. (1) The historical point when opinion polling started to dominate the conception of public opinion in the United States is the mid-1960s, although opinion polling was invented about three decades earlier. (2) Whereas the general term ‘public opinion’ tends to be used to a lesser degree, ‘public opinion’ has become closely correlated with ‘poll’ to a greater degree. (3) Public opinion has readily become a matter of fact (news) rather than opinion (editorials). (4) Opinion polling has made the news of public opinion more salient. The following two sections specifically explore the ways in which the term ‘public opinion’ and ‘poll’ are differently languaged in NYT.

5.5. RHETORICAL USES OF ‘PUBLIC OPINION’ In order to understand the grammars of ‘public opinion,’ we need to recall the relationships between the media and public opinion before the invention of opinion polling. That is to say, in the delegation and mobilization models, the media seldom seek to ‘report’ public opinion. Instead, the media function either as the public surveillance system that transparently exposes the government to the tribune of public opinion or as the organs through which public opinion is invoked and coalesced into a collective voice. The uses of the term ‘public opinion’ in the New York Times largely shows the old

196

vestiges of the delegation and mobilization models, unless the term is associated with opinion polling, and thus, the grammars of public opinion diverge drastically from the current notion viewing the media as reporter of public opinion.

 

5.5.1. References of ‘Public Opinion’   In studying the rise of public opinion (l’opinion publique) at the time of the

French Revolution, Keith Baker (1993) insists on “the significance of public opinion as a political invention rather than as a sociological function” (p. 168). According to him, “public opinion took its form as a political or ideological construct rather than as a discrete sociological referent” (p.172). Cowans (2001) also points out that French orators who used the phrase ‘public opinion’ made no attempt to specify whose opinions they were describing, while mostly using the word ‘publique’ as an adjective rather than as a noun referring to a collective body of people. In a similar vein, Herbst (1993) observes that, in the United States, journalistic discourse before the invention of scientific opinion polling was infused with partisan ideology, and the term ‘public opinion’ was geared towards symbolic politics. Even the straw polls, much like today’s ‘push polls,’ were chiefly conducted in order to inject partisanship to citizens and the reporting of straw polls tried to show off the political prowess of parties to which political journalists had loyalty. Even though the New York Times can in no way be considered as a partisan newspaper, the usage of ‘public opinion’ in NYT still demonstrates such rhetorical and symbolic functions. Concerning this, Table 5.1 shows that, among a sample of 197 NYT articles

197

Table 5.1 References of ‘Public Opinion’ No Denotable Reference

121 (61%)

Reference to Public Communication (The Press/Public Deliberation/Letters)

21 (11%)

Reference to the Aggregation of Individual Preferences (Voting/Referendum/Poll/Survey)

19 (10%)

Reference to Nation as a Whole (vis. World public opinion/International society)

15 (8%)

Reference to Unexpressed Sentiments (Public sentiments/Moods)

12 (6%)

Reference to Collective Actions (Political Parties/Civic Associations/Social Movements) Total

9 (4%) N= 197

published from 1896 to 1965, ‘public opinion’ in 121 articles (61%) did not have any references. Let us take a few examples.





Public opinion in this country is shaping itself very clearly with reference to  every form of mob rule, and not least so as to that of mobs which claim  indulgence, because they march under the banner of labor (Aug. 16, 1903)    Senator Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota declared yesterday that this nation’s only  hope of a true neutrality lay in arousing public opinion in favor of a  constitutional amendment that would enable and compel the government  officials to withstand pressure of interested banking and munitions groups (Jan  11, 1937).    198





A railroad is a public utility, and when it stops running, [as a result of railroad  strike] public opinion instantly is brought to bear. However intangible it may  seem, public opinion is a key factor in such a situation (Sep. 23, 1945).    The United States Steel Corporation negotiations opened with ninety‐two men  on the union side of the table … In steel, in marked contrast to past years, it is  quite apparent that both sides now recognize that public opinion may have as  pronounced an effect as economic muscle … (May 10, 1959).    

Although it is impossible to represent the articles in entirety, the usages of ‘public opinion’ in these examples do not refer to anything whatsoever. Notably, in these four examples, collective actions such as ‘mobs,’ ‘strike,’ ‘interest groups’ and ‘labor unions’ are not categorized as the expression of ‘public opinion.’ Belying Blumer’s sociological conception of public opinion as organized collective actions, the social definitions or social representations that can be found in NYT tended to place public opinion and collective action into different categories, and evaluate collective actions in light of public opinion as an independent category without providing any descriptions as to what the journalists meant by ‘public opinion.’ That ‘public opinion’ did not have sociological referents does not mean that it did not have semantic referents as well. That is, ‘public opinion’ in journalists’ self-definition is transferred or trans-referred to other terms, while it still lacks a reference to observable events occurring outside and/or prior to journalistic discourses about public opinion. In Table 5.1, references to ‘public communication,’ ‘nation as a whole,’ ‘unexpressed sentiments,’ and ‘collective action,’ except for the reference to ‘the aggregation of individual preferences,’ generally belong to the semantic reference.

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









“Public opinion is best made affirmative through party organization, platforms,  and campaigns, where the ideas of opposing parties are brought into  competition” (Feb 3, 1918).     Tests of Public Opinion  …… Such a symposium, in which residents of all parts of the country participate,  is of the highest practical value to everyone. It means that the ideas, principles  and methods … are at least being subject to the test of serious and enlightened  nation‐wide debate (Aug 26, 1934).    When negotiations are in progress and a settlement appears imminent, a  handful of silent, meditative pickets may suffice as a gentle reminder to public  opinion. It is in the realm of “mass picketing” that labor has introduced its most  dramatic and widely debated technique. (Dec. 26, 1937)    Perhaps the most striking change in the European scene has been the rapid  alienation by the German regime of British opinion and the growth of among all  classes in Britain of a pronounced feeling against the National Socialists (Sep 4,  1938).    If the principal newspapers faithfully reflected the sentiments of the people in  this area, it can be said at the least, that these States were desirous of giving the  Moscow parley a chance (Oct 31, 1943). 

   

In the examples above, ‘public opinion’ is variously referred to as ‘party organization, platforms, and campaigns,’ ‘nation-wide debates,’ ‘mass picketing,’ ‘British opinion,’ ‘newspapers,’ or simply ‘sentiments of the people.’ The latter terms, however, do not serve as the representation of public opinion qua concrete reports of people’s voice. In other words, journalists did not report actually existing events as public opinion. For instance, when ‘public opinion’ is equated with ‘nation-wide debate,’ there is no report of such ‘debate’ in tangible reality. Rather, these semantic references functions as the rhetorical, if not theoretical, devices in making assertions (‘party organization’), giving advice (‘mass picketing’) or appealing to normative ideals (‘nation-wide debate’). 200

Whereas journalists and politicians continued to use ‘public opinion’ devoid of sociological referents or only with semantic referents by the mid-1960s,52 they were also aware of the problem. Especially, in the early 1930s, one of the NYT editorials cautioned “We cannot take anybody’s word for it – not even that of the most expert ear held to the ground. It will not do to accept the findings of the first politician or newspaper that comes along. Cries of lo, here! or lo, there! may be only misleading” (Jun 13, 1932). Another editorial entitled ‘Public Opinion’ confesses: “Everybody pays lip-service to the will of the people. But how to find out what it is – that is the puzzle” (Sep. 10, 1933). It was not until the advent of public opinion polling in 1936 that journalists could claim to report the voice of people with specific contents (see section 5.6 of this chapter). Paradoxically, it is opinion polling that has provided journalistic discourses on public opinion with an external referent in spite of the trenchant criticism of opinion polling’s self-reference (e.g., Blumer, 1948; Boorstin, 1961; Bourdieu, 1979).

 

5.5.2. Placement of ‘Public Opinion’  Table 5.2 compares the distributions of the term ‘public opinion’ both in editorials

and news. As the table shows, among the 197 articles, the phrase ‘public opinion’ 52

A statistical test reveals no significant difference before and after 1936 in the general pattern. 1896~1935

1936~1965

No Reference

69 (65%)

52 (58%)

121 (61%)

References

38 (35%)

38 (42%)

76 (39%)

107

90

Sum

201

197 X2=.9, df=1, p=.21

appeared in 137 news articles (70%) and 60 editorials (30%). 53 Consistent with Figure 5.4 which illustrated the dwindling appearance of ‘public opinion’ in editorials, Table 5.2 shows that the mentions of ‘public opinion’ in editorials were more prominent before 1936, whereas the usage in news articles tended to increase after 1936, suggesting that, in early days, ‘public opinion’ played rhetorical functions adopted by the editors (cf. McGerr, 1986) to a greater degree.

         Table 5.2 Distributions of ‘Public Opinion’ 1896~1935

1936~1965

Editorials

46 (43%)

14 (16%)

60 (30%)

News

61 (57%)

76 (84%)

137 (70%)

Sum

107 (100%)

90 (100%) 197 2 X =17.3, df=1, p> GO TO T4  9.  (VOL) Don’t know / Refused  >> GO TO T4    T3A.  Do you think these meetings did more to help or hurt the governor’s cause, or did they  make no difference?        1.  Help      2.  Hurt      3.  No difference  9.  (VOL) Don’t know / Refused    T4.  Do you think the amount of debt the state has right now is a major problem, minor problem, or  not really a problem?     1. 

9.   

Major problem  2.  Minor problem  3.  Not really a problem  (VOL) Don’t know / Refused    T5.  Which do you think is a bigger problem for the state – growth in state debt or growth in pensions  and benefits for state workers?  

  1. 

9.    T6.  1. 

Growth in state debt  2.  Growth in pensions and benefits for state workers  3.  (VOL) Both equally  (VOL) Don’t know / Refused  Which comes closer to your view:  [ROTATE OPTIONS 1 and 2]  We should continue to make debt payments as scheduled until the debt is paid off  – OR –   2.  We should try to pay off a big chunk of the debt now in order to reduce the amount of  our annual debt payments  (VOL) Don’t know / Refused 

9.    [CATI:  SPLIT‐HALF,  ASK T7 TO FORM A ONLY]  T7.  In order to pay down state debt, would you favor or oppose the following:      A.  A smaller toll increase that would double tolls over the next ten years    B.  Increasing the gas tax by 18 cents a gallon over the next three years    C.  Leasing operation of the state lottery      1.  Favor 

265

  9. 

  2.  Oppose  (VOL) No opinion / Don’t know / Refused 

  [CATI:  SPLIT‐HALF,  ASK T8 TO FORM B ONLY]  T8.  In order to create a dedicated fund for transportation projects, would you favor or oppose the  following:      A.  A smaller toll increase that would double tolls over the next ten years    B.  Increasing the gas tax by 18 cents a gallon over the next three years    C.  Leasing operation of the state lottery      1.  Favor      2.  Oppose  9.  (VOL) No opinion / Don’t know / Refused    T9.  For this question, I’m just looking for a guess off the top of your head.   How much debt does the  state have right now (in dollars)?      $ ________  gave answer in BILLIONS    $ ________  gave answer in MILLIONS    $ _____________  (other amount)    9.    (VOL)  Refused    DEMOGRAPHICS    Now just a few final questions so we can classify your answers.    D1.  Are you currently registered to vote at the address where you now live or haven’t you had a  chance to register yet?    1.  Registered    2.  Not registered     9.  (VOL) Don't Know / Refused       D2.  In politics today, do you consider yourself a Democrat, Republican, Independent, or something else?    1.  Democratic      2.  Republican      3.  Independent      4.  Something Else / Other       9.  (VOL) Don't Know / Refused     D3.  What was the last grade in school you completed?    1.    8th grade or less    2.    High School incomplete (Grades 9, 10 and 11)    3.    High School Complete (Grade 12)    4.    Vocational/Technical School    5.    Some College    6.    Junior College Graduate (2 year, Associates Degree)    7.    4 year College Graduate (Bachelor’s Degree)    8.    Graduate School (Masters, Law/Medical School, etc.)    9.    (VOL) Don't Know / Refused    D4.  What was your age on your last birthday? 

266

                          D6.                  D7. 

___________    [ENTER NUMBER.  98 = 98 or more; 99 = Don’t Know/Refused]  D4A. [IF DK/REFUSED IN D4, ASK:]  Is it from ... [READ LIST]?    1.  18 to 34,    2.  35 to 54, or    3.  55 or over?    9.  (VOL) Don't Know/Refuse  D5. 

Are you of Latino or Hispanic origin? 

1.  2.  9. 

Yes  No  (VOL) Don't Know / Refused   

Are you white, black or of Asian origin?  1.  2.  3.  4.  5.  9. 

White  Black  Asian  (VOL) Hispanic, but won’t specify race  (VOL) Other, specify: _____________________  (VOL) Don't Know/Refused 

In what county do you live?  01 Atlantic 

08 Gloucester 

15 Ocean 

02 Bergen 

09 Hudson 

16 Passaic 

03 Burlington 

10 Hunterdon 

17 Salem 

04 Camden 

11 Mercer 

18 Somerset 

05 Cape May 

12 Middlesex 

19 Sussex 

06 Cumberland 

13 Monmouth 

20 Union  

07 Essex 

14 Morris 

21 Warren 

  

 99  (VOL) Don't Know / Refused      D8.  And what is your zip code?   _____________________    [Range = 07001 to 08904, 99999=DK/Refused]    D9.  Which municipality do you live in?  ______________________________   [99=Refused]  [SEE CODING FRAME USING D7 RESPONSE AS FILTER:     If don’t know official name, accept “place” name, code as “xx98” and record verbatim]    D10.  So that we can group all answers, is your total annual family income before taxes:  Under $50,000;  from $50,000 to just under $100,000; or $100,000 or more?  Your best estimate is fine.  [IF REFUSE, PROBE  ONCE: “We understand and respect that this information is private, we ask only for research purposes, and  all your answers are recorded confidentially.”]    1.  Under $50,000  2.  $50,000 to just under $100,000  3.  $100,000 or more      8.  (VOL) Don’t know  9.  (VOL) Refused    D11.  RECORD RESPONDENT GENDER from observation:   

267

1.  2.    D12. 

       

Male  Female 

Thanks.  You've been very helpful.    The results of the poll will be reported by the Gannett New Jersey Newspaper group.  Sometimes we need  to verify that this interview took place or someone writing up the results may want to know more about  how you feel.  Would it be okay for us to recontact you if necessary?    [IF “YES” ASK:  Could I please have just your first name?]  1.  2.     

Yes ‐‐‐‐‐> RECORD NAME: _________________________  No 

Thank you very much for your help.        SEX OF INTERVIEWER:    1.  MALE   2.  FEMALE    INTERVIEWER: PLEASE RATE HOW RESPONDENT WOULD BE IN CONVERSATION WITH A NEWS REPORTER  (articulate, thoughtful, etc.)  1  Great  2  Good  3  Fair  4  Poor   

268

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