Josh Chafetz at OxBlog is raising a fuss over recent German polls showing preference to Putin over Bush:
no matter what your values (within the range of the reasonable), Bush is preferable to Putin. Put differently, if the poll-takers suddenly found themselves in the Bundestag, where their preferences had consequences, I think they would come out differently. I think they were willing to vent their spleen at the US because the stakes were so low. And that, in my book, is a lack of seriousness. It is, perhaps, an understandable lack of seriousness — I’m sure the American public has displayed a similar tendency in some polls. But then those poll results don’t deserve to be taken seriously.
You’ll get no disagreement with me on the substance (by any reasonable measure, Putin is far worse than Bush and the Germans likely were venting their spleen), but I don’t think seriousness of the German public is the issue. What polls should be taken seriously? And how seriously? I don’t mean to be flip, I’m really wondering what opinion polls tells us. And, frankly, I’m surprised that as grad students or PhD holders that the Oxbloggers don’t have more intellectual curiosity of the methodological tools of their field. Opinion polls don’t measure the attitudes of those polled, they measure the responses that those polled feel they should give. Often those responses diverge from underlying attitude. Sometimes moral reasons lead interviewees to respond with what they think “should” rather than “is”. Sometimes interviewees anticipate what the interviewer or society in general thinks it the correct answer and responds accordingly. Sometimes they take an opinion poll lodge as the occasion to lodge protest. That’s what the Germans are doing (as Josh concedes); in fact rather than unserious, it’s a serious attempt to signal to those like Oxblog that they violently disagree with U.S. foreign policy (since they’re powerless to change it otherwise).
Of course, this disjuncture — not to mention the fact that opinion polls are always elections without consequences — has been one of the complaints of the critical-left critique of public opinion (see this summary). Even if policy scholars and policy makers do not subscribe to the rest of their critique, they would do better to take seriously the difference between words and attitudes and think of some way of measuring it empirically. Same, too, for academic political science, though for all I know, they already are doing just that. I simply don’t know political science enough to weigh in on that. (Though the work of Susan Herbst, for instance, doesn’t strike me as far out of the mainstream of the discipline).
Finally, we should note that the critical-left critique of public opinion is far more widespread in Western Europe (where the likes of Habermas, Bourdieu and Baudrillard appear on the bestseller lists) than in the US, so that opinion poll respondents are less likely to take the poll-taking seriously. And why should they? They’re not in Bundestag and their preferences have no consequences. And at least to judge from the number of emails I receive urging me to vote in some online “opinion poll” or other to sway the results, the German respondents are not acting in an exceptional way but grasp the heart of how opinion polls function in a mass public sphere.
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