Page 139 - The Making of the German Post-war Economy

112 THE MAKING OF THE GERMAN POST-WAR ECONOMY

Tocqueville describing a social pressure to conform, this formulation
departs from the more customary definition of a collection of individual
opinions and delineates it as a social-system-level concept. Public opinion,
from this perspective, imposes sanctions on individuals who are not in
step with convention. Fearing sanctions, such as social isolation and
unpopularity, individuals are constantly sensitive to the climate of opinion,
which differentiates popular from unpopular opinions. The match or
mismatch between the personal viewpoint and the perceived majoritarian
opinion determines subsequent expression of the individually held
opinion. If the personal view is socially dominant or ascendant, it will be
expressed willingly in public. However, if the view is in the minority or on
the decline, the individual fearing social sanction will be silent. Noelle-
Neumann’s spiral of silence metaphor attempts to model an opinion
winnowing process, wherein perceived majority opinions become self-
fulfilling prophecies because uninhibited expressions give the appearance
of being more widely held than may actually be the case; and minority
opinions, being silenced by their conformist proponents, appear less
widely held than they truly are. As minority opinions spiral into silence,
people in society are increasingly confronted with one viewpoint that
appears dominant. Due to this effect that the opinion of a majority may
not always be public and the inherent potential for political
communication and media influence over atomised citizens through the
use of propaganda and through inclusion or omission of information, it is
difficult to limit the assessment of public opinion to the most popular
opinion. Finally, other scholars suggest that public opinion is less a
reflection of citizens’ opinions but rather the projection of what elites, i.e.
journalists, politicians, or pollsters, believe. Although this notion that
public opinion is a creation of social leaders may seem cynical, it has a
large number of adherents. According to Walter Lippmann, the common
citizen could not possibly stay informed on all affairs of state and, given
this impossibility, could hardly be relied upon to produce intelligent
opinion on public affairs. Thus, one could only turn to a government of
specialists and see public opinion as the expression of elite opinion; the
will of the people can therefore never be any more than the will of some
of the people. Similarly, James Best noted that ‘one could only conclude
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that the only public opinion which is relevant in the policy-making process
is the opinion of the attentive public or the opinion elite.’ While these
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categories are not mutually exclusive, this assessment considers the
aggregated preferences of all individuals weighed equally in the conduct of
the government that is weighed with no discrimination as to the content
or source of the preference, in order to satisfy the claim for a balanced
public opinion. Thus, for the purpose of this research and by no means in