Guest post: Majority rules?
Opinion polls and democratic decision making
Anyone watching the recent health care vote on C-SPAN heard the same refrain from the Republican opposition: the healthcare bill (now law) is morally wrong because a majority of Americans oppose it. Many conservatives made this argument during the year-long slog, citing public opinion polls for support. Indeed, across the political spectrum public opinion polls are regularly used as a defense for or against particular legislation or government actions. But what do opinions polls really tell us? And what role should they have in deciding how we as a political society should act?
The impulse to invoke public opinion as a moral basis for democratic actions is understandable. Citizens in democracies are self-ruling. Acting contrary to the majority opinion is often seen as violating the public will. And opinion polls are as close as we can get in the short term at least, to taking the temperature of the public. Elections are held periodically, but they can only stop perceived injustices after the fact. For instance, assume Congress passes a wildly unpopular bill. It may take upwards of two years before the electorate can voice its disapproval through elections. But after two years, the damage may already be done. It is difficult to retroactively repair injustices. Opinion polls are all we have to assess the public will on a bill by bill basis.
But do opinion polls actually tell us the public will?
The Founders held the view that people should know what they are talking about before we act on their opinion. This is why they established institutions like elections and public forums wherein citizens could debate and reflect upon arguments and then cast their vote. Democracy in this view is more than the aggregation of individual preferences, rather it is the establishment of a common understanding on how a civil society should act. People should not only give positions, but also provide reasons for these positions and submit them for public critique. Democracies are morally better when their reasons for action are subjected to this reasoned discourse.
But consider the generic opinion poll: participants are randomly selected, often reached by telephone after dinner. They have to respond to political questions on the spot without the chance to reflect upon the issue or deliberate it with others. Opinion polls as they are designed today articulate the positions of individuals in isolation. They force people to make political and moral decisions in a vacuum. Individuals are not required to defend their positions or even provide reasons for them. Polls like this, then, seem to carry little more weight. And democracy is ill-served when they are relied upon to justify democratic action.
This does not mean that opinion polls cannot be changed. Professor James Fishkin of Stanford University proposes what he calls ‘deliberative opinion polling’ in his book Democracy and Deliberation. In Fishkin’s poll participants are randomly selected and required to debate an issue with the other participants before they are polled on it. This deliberative aspect is more in line with the Founders’ view of how public opinion should be created. The deliberation is what gives the poll moral legitimacy.
Public opinion polls as they are designed today are useful to democracies for no other reason than they articulate how the public feels about an issue at a given moment. But this should just be the beginning, not the end of the process. Democracies should act not based upon how people feel but what people think. The deliberative polling that Fishkin advocates is a good step in the right direction.
-Andrew Dombrowski
Andrew Dombrowski is a Political Science and Philosophy major at the University of Chicago
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