A MISSING CONCEPT
Kettering Review, Fall 1991

by Daniel Yankelovich

Because democracy has flourished in the United States for more than two hundred years, Americans watch with a certain complacency as countries in other parts of the world -- Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia -- grope and stumble to learn how it works. The complacency, however, is unwarranted. Even with America's long experience with democracy, important lessons still elude us. Moreover, as the 1990s unfold, our own democratic practices are being tested in harsh new ways.

The soul of the American Dream harbors a conception, however vague, of freedom to take part in shaping the common destiny. Throughout our history, one of the most persistent themes in American political thought has been how to create a community in which al1 Americans participate fully as citizens. This is the Dream of Self-governance of free people shaping their destiny together as equals. "You may be richer and smarter than I am but my vote counts as much as yours." This article of faith is as important to Americans as the chance to better themselves materially. The dream is that of having a say on the fundamental issues that shape people's lives: war and peace, taxes, justice, freedom from crime and violence, fairness, caring for the family, social stability, preserving the environment, ensuring that America plays a special role in the world, living together in a neighborly way with one's fellow Americans.

Crowding Out the Public

This expression of the American Dream, the Dream of Self-governance, is threatened. Assuredly, the threat is not to the kind of freedom Americans care about most. Our political liberty is not endangered. No dictator looms on the horizon. No military coup is in the offing. And whatever danger communism may have posed to our political freedom in the past, Americans will be as free in the future as in the past to vote for the candidate of their choice, to speak their minds, and to enjoy the advantages of a free press.

The danger, rather, lies in the eroding ability of the American public to participate in the political decisions that affect their lives. The fateful decisions are made in Washington, in corporate boardrooms, on Wall Street, in state legislatures, and in city halls. They are shaped by economic experts, military experts, scientific experts, trade experts, PR experts, media experts. Less and less are they shaped by the public.

On the surface, citizen participation seems to have improved. Much new legislation requires citizen review; the political parties are no longer dominated by decisions made behind the scenes in those infamous "smoke-filled rooms"; there are more referendums and polls than ever before. In recent years, the public has gained greater influence in foreign policy, once the exclusive preserve of an elite. And yet, paradoxically, the more "democratic" the formal side of American political life has become, the less real voice the American public has in shaping national policies. The more formal power "We, the people" acquire, the less actual influence we seem to have.

Talk to members of Congress and they will tell you that they spend most of their time being responsive to their constituents. But if you ask them who these constituents are, they turn out to be lobbyists and special interests, not individual citizens or at least not those with average incomes. In their speeches they may refer to the "folks," but it is not the folks who finance their campaigns.

Talk to high-level policymakers and they will tell you how much input they get from economists and scientific advisers and legislative experts. But if you ask about input from the public, invariably they will misunderstand the question. When formulating important national policies, it would never even occur to most policymakers to consult average citizens. Beneath the surface of format arrangements to ensure citizen participation, the political reality is that an intangible something separates the general public from the thin layer of elites  officials, experts, and leaders who hold the real power and make the important decisions.

When there are problems to address, elites discuss them exclusively with other elites. Political leaders talk among themselves or with business leaders, with educators, with lawyers, with economists, with lobbyists. It is against the American credo to stratify people by social class, but one of the most rigid barriers in today's America is the barrier that separates the men and women who "serve" the public from the public itself.

To offset creeping expertism, the public must be able to stand its ground against the experts better than it is now doing. Unfortunately, however, most average citizens are ill-prepared to exercise their responsibilities for self-governance, even though they have a deep-seated desire to have more of a say in decisions. People want their opinions heeded not every whim and impulse that may be registered in an opinion poll, but their thoughtful, considered judgments. Yet in present-day America, few institutions are devoted to helping the public to form considered judgments, and the public is discouraged from doing the necessary hard work because there is little incentive to do so. In principle, the people are sovereign. In practice, the experts and technocrats have spilled over their legitimate boundaries and are encroaching on the public's territory.

The key to successful self-governance in our Age of Information is to create a new balance between public and experts. Today, that relationship is badly skewed toward experts at the expense of the public. This out-of-balance condition is not the result of a power struggle (though this is not wholly absent) but of a deep-rooted cultural trend that elevates the specialized knowledge of the expert to a place of high honor while denigrating the value of the public's potentially most important contribution a high level of thoughtful and responsible public judgment. For democracy to flourish, it is not enough to get out the vote. We need better public judgment, and we need to know how to cultivate it. But the public is not magically endowed with good judgment. Good judgment is something that must be worked at all the time and with great skill and effort. It does not exist automatically; it must be created.

The Missing Concept

There is a missing concept in American democracy, giving rise to many negative consequences. The missing concept is a set of terms to describe the quality of public opinion and to distinguish "good" public opinion from "bad." Quality judgments are commonplace in our culture. Standards of excellence exist for automobiles, movies, plumbers, surgeons, CEOs, chefs. We know what we mean when we say, "She is a good friend; he is a good neighbor; they are good parents." There are tests and standards, formal and informal, for quality for tangible products and intangible ideas: its resale value is a good pragmatic test of a car's worth; if the doctor's patient dies, the operation is not a success; good friends are those who stand by you in times of trouble and need. Winning an Oscar for a movie, winning a Pulitzer Prize for a book, winning a Nobel Prize for a scientific achievement these are society's methods for designating quality and excellence. But when it comes to public opinion, there are no standards for quality.

Students of public opinion have learned that Americans are a highly opinionated people; Americans hold an opinion on almost every subject, whether they know anything about it or not, whether they feel passionately or are indifferent to it. Sometimes the seriousness and generosity of the public's judgments are startling. At other times the public seems mindless and irresponsible. Surely, the reader of public opinion polls must sometimes wonder, "Is this really the public's opinion? How can people be so blind, so foolish, so easily manipulated?" Americans hold strong views on drug abuse, abortion, capital punishment, nuclear power, sex education in the schools, protectionism, ethics in government, rising health care costs, acid rain, affirmative action, censorship, and so forth. On some of these issues, the quality of public opinion is amazingly good on others, abysmally bad.

But how should one distinguish "good" opinion from "bad" in a reasonably objective manner? I propose that the quality of public opinion be considered good when the public accepts responsibility for the consequences of its views and poor when the public, for whatever reason, is unprepared to do so. When the public offhandedly rejects the need for tax increases to reduce the federal budget deficit on the unrealistic grounds that correcting "waste, fraud, and abuse" would cause the problem to disappear this is poor quality. There may be sound grounds for opposing tax increases, but the ritualistic incantation about "waste, fraud, and abuse" serves merely as a rationalization that people seize upon because it permits them to avoid the issue.

When, in 1979, Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini took Americans hostage, the public's impulsive first reaction was violent. Some people wanted to send the marines to rescue the hostages. Others growled, "Nuke 'em! Drop some nuclear bombs on Teheran!" Anger, wounded pride, hatred, fear these were the emotions Americans were feeling and expressing. Yet within a few days, most Americans began to have second thoughts. As they confronted the realities of the problem, the majority came to support a policy that called for more patience and forbearance. They began to take responsibility for the consequences of their views. The initially poor quality of public opinion showed marked improvement in a brief period.

The opinion survey literature abounds in examples in which people express opinions without being mindful of their consequences. A series of Roper polls shows that, for many years, a large majority of the public said they favored protectionist legislation against foreign imports in the interests of protecting American jobs. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll shows a similar pattern: a 51 percent majority favor "greater limits on goods imported into the United States." But when the same people were told that such limits might restrict the variety and choice of products available to them, and that with protectionism they might have to sacrifice quality in products, the 51 percent majority dwindled to a meager 19 percent minority. Obviously, people had not given the consequences of protectionism a moment's thought. (In 1988, presidential aspirant Richard Gephardt may have been misled by public opinion polls on protectionism. He learned the hard way how fragile and volatile the public's views were on this issue.) When people's views flip-flop the moment the possible consequences of their opinions are raised, this is a sure sign of a poor quality of opinion.

Opinion and Judgment

In today's America, the chief cause of poor-quality public opinion is the failure to confront the inevitable costs and tradeoffs involved in making choices. Among the many devices people have for avoiding reality, the most common is to keep related aspects of an issue mentally separated, failing to make the proper connections between them. By compartmentalizing their thinking, people can maintain contradictory and conflicting opinions without being mentally discomforted. When people think about preserving American jobs, they endorse protectionism. When they think about consumer values lower prices, better quality, and more choice they oppose protectionism. As long as their thinking is compartmentalized, they are unable to take a firm and unwavering stand on the issue.

Frequently, compartmentalized thinking is linked to certain words or phrases that have become politically tainted  code words to which the public responds in ways that do not reflect their true feelings. Thus, people automatically oppose government spending in the abstract but simultaneously endorse programs that involve government spending for causes they support, such as the war on drugs. Politicians shy away from the term détente because it is linked in people's minds with a failed policy. But the same people who reject the word détente endorse a policy of reduced tensions with the Soviets (in other words, détente). One of the most tainted words in the political vocabulary is "welfare." Americans dislike the word and the concept. But, in practice, they support the content of welfare programs as long as the word is not used. When Americans are asked whether the country is now spending "too little" or "too much" or "the right amount" on "assistance to the poor," by a ten to one margin (68 percent to 7 percent), they think we are spending too little. But when asked the same question about welfare spending, by two to one (42 percent to 23 percent), they say we are spending too much!

It is contradictions such as these that cause the experts to throw up their hands in disgust and pronounce the public incapable of dealing with complex problems; or else they denounce opinion polls as unreliable and worse than useless. But to the experienced researcher who knows that the public is capable of holding firm, consistent, and highly discriminating views on complex subjects, such a whopper of a contradiction is only a signal that people have compartmentalized their thinking.

In what follows, I will use the term raw opinion to refer to poor-quality public opinion as defined primarily by people's failure to take the consequences of their views into account. I will use the term "public judgment" to refer to good-quality public opinion in the sense that people accept full responsibility for the consequences of their views.

To say that public judgment has been reached on an issue does not imply that people comprehend all of the relevant facts or that they agree with the views of elites. It does imply that people have struggled with the issue, thought about it in their own terms, and formed a judgment they are willing to stand by.

In its full meaning, "public judgment" connotes a particular form of public opinion that exhibits (1) more thoughtfulness, more weighing of alternatives, more genuine engagement with the issue, more taking into account a wide variety of factors than ordinary public opinion as measured in opinion polls; and (2) more emphasis on the normative, valuing, ethical side of questions than on the factual, informational side.

Words reveal a great deal about a culture. The Eskimos have many words for snow. The French have a famous vocabulary for food. The fact that our culture has no generally accepted vocabulary to distinguish between raw opinion and mature public judgment reveals a blind spot in the way Americans think about this subject.

Unfortunately, the umbrella term "public opinion" obscures the distinction between raw opinion and public judgment. It is almost as if we were to use the word bread to refer both to the baked loaf one buys from the bakery or supermarket and also to an unbaked or half-baked lump of dough. If consumers were to use the word bread for both objects, they would never know when they were buying the baked loaf or the half-baked one. Just so, when we refer to public opinion, we do not know whether we are referring to half-baked raw opinion or to fully developed public judgment.

An Invaluable Mental Power

Most expressions of public opinion, as measured in opinion polls, do not reflect public judgment. For example, opinion polls report that Americans believe the threat of global warming to be of the utmost gravity, so much so that people say the nation should not wait for scientific proof to take far-reaching remedial action. And yet, these same studies also show that Americans are unwilling to consider even modest sacrifices or changes in life-style (e.g., a tax on gasoline or paying more for exhaust emission controls). This specimen of public opinion is not public judgment. Rather, it is merely a snapshot of public opinion at a moment in time, caught in the turmoil of grappling with an abstract threat that is not yet real and that Americans have not yet genuinely engaged. Two years from now, or five, or twenty years from now, events may force the public to confront the issue more fully, struggle with the pain of hard choices, and make a fateful decision to accept the changes needed to counter the threat. Then we will have true public judgment.

Public judgment does not always take decades to form or to wait upon catastrophic events. Studies of public opinion on immigration policy, for example, show that people's first impulse is strikingly different from their considered judgments. The public's first impulse is to close the door on refugees and immigrants coming to America because "we have to take care of our own first." But then, after reflecting on the moral meaning of what this country stands for, many people shift their views toward supporting more open and generous immigration policies.

As I use the term, "public judgment" is the state of highly developed public opinion that exists once people have engaged an issue, considered it from all sides, understood the choices it leads to, and accepted the full consequences of the choices they make. Judgment, in this sense, is an old-fashioned word, much valued in the American tradition before the current age of expertise and information. Today, the term "public judgment" has an odd and unfamiliar ring to it. But the downgrading of judgment in favor of expertise is relatively new in American history. Historian Paul Gagnon gives a good description of the importance assigned to judgment in the America of a century ago. Gagnon describes an 1892 commission report (the so-called Committee of Ten) that recommends four years of history for all college students on the grounds that the study of history promotes "the invaluable mental power we call judgment." As Gagnon describes it, judgment is the indispensable quality citizens in a democracy must possess to raise the level of public debate. It implies the ability: to question stereotypes . . . to discern the difference between fact and conjecture . . . to distrust the simple answer and the dismissive explanation . . . to realize that all problems do not have solutions . . . to be prepared for the irrational, the accidental in human affairs . . . to grasp the power of ideas and character in history . . . to accept the burden of living with tentative answers, with unfinished and often dangerous business . . . to accept costs and compromises, to honor the interests of others while pursuing their own . . . to respect the needs of future generations, to speak the truth and do the right things when falsehood and the wrong thing would be more profitable, and generally to restrain appetites and expectation all this while working to inform themselves on the multiple problem s and choices their elected officials confront.

Gagnon's characterization of judgment, though considerably broader and more sweeping than my own, identifies the essential elements of judgment. He recognizes the complexity and variety of judgments citizens must make. Unambiguously, he includes the ethical dimension of opinion as well as the cognitive one. Most importantly, he implicitly distinguishes between judgment and information. Only after citing the multiple facets of judgment, does Gagnon add that citizens must also -- in addition to exercising judgment -- "inform themselves on multiple problems and choices."

A Different Model

By focusing on public judgment, we can begin to shape a concept of public opinion that is different from the prevailing model (especially among journalists) that the one and only criterion in questions of public opinion is how well informed people are in the sense of how much information they possess on an issue.

Many of the most influential observers and analysts of public opinion distinguish good public opinion from bad in terms of information. Good public opinion is being "well informed"; being poorly informed is synonymous with bad quality. Journalists, above all others, equate being well informed with high quality. The media are fascinated with opinion polls that show how ignorant the public is. Conduct a poll that reveals that the majority of Americans cannot name a single justice of the Supreme Court, or cannot locate Siberia on a map, and it is sure to get wide TV and newspaper coverage. Journalists hold as an article of faith the traditional belief that a well-informed citizenry is indispensable to the proper functioning of democracy.

It would be perverse to deny that information is relevant to the quality of public opinion. But in a professional lifetime devoted to its study, I have come to the conclusion that equating quality opinion with being well informed is a serious mistake. Obviously, information plays some role in shaping public opinion. But often it is a minor role. To assume that public opinion is invariably improved by inundating people with information grossly distorts the role of information. A society operating on this assumption misconstrues the nature and purpose of public opinion in a democracy.

The role of information can be compared to the role that memory plays for a great pianist. It would be ludicrous to say, "She is a great pianist because she has an excellent memory." On the other hand, the loss of memory would be a disaster, as those acquainted with Alzheimer's disease know all too well. In calling attention to the noninformation components of quality, I am not denigrating information anymore than I would be denigrating memory by pointing to the qualities of creativity, technique, and feeling that make for greatness in a pianist.

Some journalists (and others who hold this point of view) are too sophisticated to reduce being well informed to a sandpile of data. They have a broader concept that includes coherence of outlook and contextual understanding as well as information about the raw "facts." But broad or narrow, concepts of quality-as-well-informed all share one common characteristic that differentiates them from the model of quality-as-public judgment advanced here. They all stress the cognitive, information-absorbing side of public opinion. In contrast, the public judgment model stresses the emotive, valuing, ethical side, which includes the cognitive base but moves beyond it.

In the dominant model, poor quality means that essential information is lacking. In the public judgment model, poor quality (raw opinion) means being caught in unresolved cross pressures. In the dominant model, the remedy for poor quality is to communicate more information. But what is the remedy for overcoming raw opinion? How do you get from it to public judgment? Admittedly, the path is difficult a bumpy road full of potholes and roadblocks and detours. The territory is unexplored because it has been so completely hidden by the more familiar quality-as-well-informed model. But if one steps back to gain perspective, the road from mass opinion to public judgment, as it might be seen on a map, is surprisingly straight and orderly.

There are three stages in moving from raw opinion to public judgment. The first is "consciousness raising." The second is "working through." The third is "resolution."

Consciousness Raising

Consciousness raising is the stage in which the public learns about an issue and becomes aware of its existence and meaning. I call it consciousness raising because this term, borrowed from the women's movement, is more accurate than "creating greater awareness." Consciousness raising means much more than mere awareness. One can be aware of an issue without feeling that it is important or that anything needs to be done about it. When, however, we speak about consciousness raising on the environment, for example, the intention is clear. When one's consciousness is raised, not only does awareness grow but so do concern and readiness for action.

The broad outlines of consciousness raising, American-style, are familiar. Daily, we are bombarded with advertising messages, public relations stories, advocacy group claims, and news reports of events local and global, trivial and momentous. We ignore most of them and glance casually at those that manage to catch our interest. To avoid information overload, we screen out all but the tiniest fraction of the messages beamed at us.

But some events are so dramatic or important to our lives that they penetrate the screen, lodging themselves in our consciousness: earthquakes, acts of terrorism and hostage taking, airplane crashes that take hundreds of lives, major oil spills, nuclear accidents, new medical breakthroughs, and scandals in high places. The symbols are familiar: Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, the 1989 San Francisco quake, the Exxon Valdez, Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait it is easy to recall these and other images from the recent past that raised the nation's consciousness.

Sometimes the agency of consciousness raising is not an event, but a book or article, such as Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique, that introduced the very concept of "consciousness raising"; or Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, that did so much to make the nation aware of the threats to the environment; or Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed that launched the consumer movement. But most consciousness raising does not depend on seminal books or dramatic events. Consciousness raising is the bread-and-butter business of the press, which it carries out with great vigor and proficiency day after day, year after year. Whether it is a series of articles or TV shows on rising health care costs, or the cancer-threatening effects of Alar on apples, or the abuses of the savings and loan industry, or influence peddling in Congress, the media are on the job. They recognize consciousness raising as an important part of their function, and treat it accordingly.

But because consciousness raising is their main goal, the media are preoccupied with it, at the expense of the other two stages. If there is an important news story to cover that should arouse public concern and alarm, the media are superb at beating the drums and getting everyone agitated. But once people are whipped into a state of high anxiety, the news media then move on to their next interest, a new task of consciousness raising, as if arousing people's concerns were an end in itself. Just as people are starting to wonder, "What in the world should we do about this problem?" the news media move on to the next story.

By shifting restlessly from one story to another, the news media leave the public either in a state of moral frenzy or in a passive posture of being entertained and diverted. One week it is the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, the next week the hostages in Lebanon, the next the murder of citizens who interfere with the drug traffic in their neighborhoods. We barely begin to focus on one issue before it is gone and replaced by another. In each instance consciousness raising is achieved, but the task of stage 2 working through is greatly complicated. It is hard enough for the public to come to grips with painful choices even when the ground is well prepared; when it is not, the task is made doubly difficult, and working through can be delayed for years.

For the second stage, I borrow a term from psychology, "working through." When the consciousness-raising stage has been completed, the individual must confront the need for change. The change may be slight or it may be very great. A woman who has undergone consciousness raising about a bad marriage may be faced with the prospect of separation or divorce or confrontation with her husband. A man whose consciousness has been raised about the dangers of cholesterol may be faced with the need to make drastic changes in his diet. Other changes may be less demanding and traumatic: having heard about the dangers of ozone depletion from aerosol dispensers, a consumer may be willing to switch to a different type of dispenser for insect repellent or shaving cream, even though it may be less efficient. Often it is not people's overt behavior that must change, but their attitudes.

Working Through

As observers of human psychology know well, all change is difficult. When people are caught in cross pressures, before they can resolve them it is necessary to struggle with the conflicts and ambivalences and defenses they arouse. Change requires hard work. Rarely does the course of change proceed smoothly. Rather, it is full of backsliding and procrastination and avoidance. "Two steps forward and one step back" is the apt common description for the process. Psychologists call it "working through," especially when one is reconciling oneself to a painful loss.

To an extraordinary degree, the requirements of the working-through stage differ from those of consciousness raising. When working through, people must abandon the passive-receptive mode that works well enough for consciousness raising. They must be actively engaged and involved. Rarely is working through completed quickly. Typically, it takes an irreducible period of time much longer than the time needed to convey and absorb new information. The length of time depends on the emotional significance of the proposed change to the individual.

Though events can sometimes affect the working-through process, they are not critical to it: working through is a largely internal process that individuals have to work at and ultimately achieve for themselves. Nor is working through media driven or information dependent, as is consciousness raising; generally, people engaged in working through may have al1 the information they need long before they are willing to confront the cross pressures that ensnare them.

Finally, unlike the consciousness-raising stage, our society is not well equipped with the institutions or knowledge it needs to expedite working through; our culture does not understand it very well and, by and large, does not do a good job with it. In brief, then, there is a wrenching discontinuity between consciousness raising and working through, and that discontinuity is a major source of difficulty in any effort to improve the quality of public opinion.

The third stage is resolution, the result of successful consciousness raising and working through.

The most important point to make about this stage is that resolution is multifaceted. On any issue, to complete working through successfully, the public must resolve where it stands cognitively, emotionally, and morally. These facets of resolution are interrelated, but they each require hard work in their own right and are surprisingly independent of one another.

Cognitive resolution requires that people clarify fuzzy thinking, reconcile inconsistencies, break down the walls of the artificial compartmentalizing that keeps them from recognizing related aspects of the same issue, take relevant facts and new realities into account, and grasp the consequences of various choices with which they are presented.

Emotional resolution means that people have to confront their own ambivalent feelings, accommodate themselves to unwelcome realities, and overcome their urge to procrastinate and to avoid the issue. Of all the obstacles to resolution, none is more difficult to overcome than the need to reconcile deeply felt conflicting values.

In arriving at moral re solution, people's first impulse is to put themselves and their own needs and desires ahead of their ethical commitments. But once they have time to reflect on their choices, the ethical dimension comes into play and people struggle to do the right thing. Issues such as AIDS and homelessness and healthcare for those who cannot afford insurance cannot be resolved until the ethical dimension has been considered and dealt with, one way or the other.

Each one of these dimensions of judgment is beset with obstacles, which is why, in today's America, raw opinion is so prevalent and public judgment so elusive. Yet one should not be discouraged by this requirement that people need impressive moral, cognitive, and emotional resources to succeed in working through. The fact is that people do work through their conflicts much of the time; and that most of these conflicts can be overcome by a combination of time and focus on them.

All individuals have their blind spots, and so do all societies. But in a healthy democratic society, as in a healthy individual, the blind spots are only spots; and there is a depth of moral concern in the public that experts ignore because they do not know what to make of it. Compared to the truths of science, the truths of public judgment are broader and come closer to the ideals of human wisdom that underlie the bold presumption that we are capable of governing ourselves.