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On the Influence of Debate on Public Opinion

In a democracy public opinion is important. It is important that it be expressed; it is important that it be heard. It is also important that account be taken of it. Unfortunately, public opinion is not always easy to assess. The only opportunity generally available in the UK for a true expression of public opinion on national issues is the General Election. However, this does not provide the opportunity for the nation’s preference on individual issues to be quantified. One can only vote for a party and in doing so one is voting for the complete package of policies contained in that party’s manifesto. The referendum would seem to be the obvious solution to this problem and this has been used extensively since the war by several European countries, notably France and Switzerland, on a variety of issues. Britain, on the other hand, does not favour the use of the referendum on national issues, preferring to adopt the attitude that Parliament is elected to make the decisions. Public opinion polls may therefore be seen as playing an important role in the operation of the process of democratic government in that they provide a widely publicized measure of the national mood on a variety of issues. Public opinion polls have now become important news items in themselves and a government cannot help taking note of what they purport to say. Whether it would be deflected from its course on any particular policy issue by an opinion poll, however, is doubtful. For an opinion poll is not a referendum; nor does it pretend to replace a referendum. Pollsters in the UK generally adhere now to a strict code of practice in reporting their results, confining their reports to factual statements including the actual questions asked, the method of sampling employed, the size of the sample and the dates of the fieldwork. This is in order that no one should be in a position to read anything more into the results than there is. Nevertheless some journalists and campaign protagonists will inevitably interpret polls in a way to suit their own purposes. For instance, the East Anglian anti-nuclear groups have actually submitted the results of a number of local and national opinion polls as ‘evidence’ to the public inquiry into the proposal to build a nuclear power station of the * The co-operation of the British Broadcasting Corporation is gratefully acknowledged. In particular thanks are due to the producer of the radio programme ‘You the Jury’, Maggie Redfern, for supplying the data and for useful comment and discussion. The author is employed by the Central Electricity Generating Board at the Berkeley Nuclear Laboratories in Gloucestershire, and he would like to thank his employers for assistance and encouragement in preparing the paper. However, the study was carried out by the author in a private capacity and any views expressed are not necessarily shared by the CEGB.