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Jacobs, Lawrence R. "Commentary: Manipulators and Manipulation: Public Opinion in a Representative Democracy"
Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law - Volume 26, Number 6, December 2001, pp. 1361-1374
Duke University Press


Excerpt
Politicians and special interests have attempted to capture and manipulate citizens for as long as recorded history. The question is not whether elites attempt to manipulate citizens but whether and to what degree they succeed. Is public opinion relatively autonomous from the willful strategies of politicians and private interests to manipulate it in specific directions? Or, are citizens willfully manipulated into engaging in a form of mass karaoke in which they mouth "opinions that they would not hold if aware of the best available information" (Zaller 1992: 313)? The relative autonomy of public opinion is an age-old question that cuts to the core of debates over the scope, nature, and feasibility of democratic government --government based on responsiveness to the mass public.

Joseph Schumpeter (1950), one of the most influential democratic theorists of the twentieth century, argued for government by technocrats precisely because of his deep skepticism about citizens, a skepticism that has been shared by a string of political observers from Plato to Walter Lippmann. Schumpeter (ibid: 263-264) declared that the "popular will" had "little, if any, independent basis" and was captured by the organizationally and financially advantaged. Mass public opinion was simply the manufactured "product" of "salesmen"--self-seeking politicians and special interests with an "axe to grind" who skillfully used the techniques of mass advertising to produce the public attitudes that they desired. Workable democratic government, Schumpeter argued (ibid: 269), required narrowly restricting the role of citizens to selecting "the men [End Page 1361] who are able to do the deciding" based on their instrumental and technical knowledge that uniquely equipped them to fashion wise and beneficial policy.

For many political observers, the political history of the twentieth century seemed to illustrate the potential for...