Page 40 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

POLITICS, DEMOCRACY AND THE MEDIA

make their political choices must circulate freely and be available to
all.
But democratic policies are public in another sense too. While
democratic theory stresses the primacy of the individual, the political
process nevertheless demands that individuals act collectively in
making decisions about who will govern them. The private political
opinions of the individual become the public opinion of the people
as a whole, which may be reflected in voting patterns and treated as
advice by existing political leaders. Public opinion, in this sense, is
formed in what German sociologist Jürgen Habermas has called
‘the public sphere’.

By the public sphere we mean first of all a realm of our
social life in which something approaching public opinion
can be formed. . . . Citizens behave as a public body when
they confer in an unrestricted fashion – that is, within the
guarantee of freedom of assembly and association and the
freedom to express and publish their opinions.
(Quoted in Pusey, 1978, p. 89)

Habermas locates the development of the public sphere in
eighteenth-century Britain, where the first newspapers had already
begun to perform their modern function of supplying not only
information but also opinion, comment and criticism, facilitating
debate amongst the emerging bourgeois and educated classes.
Quoting Thomas McCarthy, Habermas shows how these new social
forces gradually replaced a political system ‘in which the [auto-
cratic] ruler’s power was merely represented before the people with
a sphere in which state authority was publicly monitored through
informed and critical discourse by the people’ (quoted in Habermas,
1989, p. xi). In the coffee-house and salon cultures of Britain and
France, debate and political critique became, for the first time,
public property (meaning, of course, the bourgeois public, which
excluded the mass of poor and illiterate underclasses). According to
Habermas, the first use of the term ‘public opinion’ was documented
in 1781, referring to ‘the critical reflection of a [bourgeois] public
competent to form its own judgments’ (ibid., p. 90).
Gripsund notes that the public sphere thus emerged as ‘a set of
institutions representing a sort of “buffer zone” between the state/
king and private sphere, to protect them from arbitrary decisions
that interfered with what they considered private activities in an
irrational way’ (1992, p. 89). The press in particular ‘was to

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