Turbulences in the Climate of Opinion: Methodological Applications of the Spiral of Silence Theory

Abstract

13o, PINION and attitude surveys were, from the start, linked to the concept of public opinion. When a new quarterly journal for this field was founded in 1937, the title of Public Opinion Quarterly was adopted, apparently without qualms. Yet the relationship between survey results and public opinion has been insufficiently discussed. We have developed new kinds of questions and analytic models based on an interpretation of the concept of public opinion. This conceptualization enables us to observe the development of the climate of opinion and of the attitudes of individuals earlier and more clearly than is possible with conventional survey questions.Two very different meanings attach to the concept of public opinion: The first carries a critical connotation-public opinion is the judgment, founded on rational discussion, of informed and responsible citizens meting out praise or blame to the government. The second meaning, which is older, connotes pressure to conform. This is how Jean Jacques Rousseau, who coined the concept of public opinion in 1750, understood it, and so did John Locke, almost a hundred years earlier, who gave a Abstract New tools for measuring changes in public opinion can be derived from the theory of the spiral of silence. Measures of individual assessment of the climate of opinion and of confidence about showing one's own opinion document the processes by which the losing side falls increasingly silent and the winning side is therefore overrated.

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