Chapter one: The History of The Public Opinion Introduction The public opinion is a set of attitudes and views of individuals concerned with particular controversial issues, including politics and government action. Its impact is not only limited to politics and elections, but also concerned with many other spheres, such as culture, literature, the arts, public relations and so on. The American public opinion has been a subject of inquiry since the rise of democratic states, in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries because governments started to be well known, and democracies were expected to present and be responsible for their people. Before dealing with the American public opinion, one should know the nature of the notion and its …show more content…
In his American Commonwealth 1888, he concentrated on three main features of public opinion, the competence of public, the constitution of public opinion, and the relationship of public opinion with opinion leaders (i.e. the function of public opinion in the political procedure). In that research Bryce observed the insufficiency of attentiveness that is showed by public in politics, so that he did not trust that public opinion could or ought to decide the subtle elements of policy. However, he observed that this latter in America was dominated by the mass public through political parties. Studies about the public opinion that showed up in that period were comparable in focus to Bryce's work, but they did not reach the same conclusion, the two authors A. Lawrence Lowell and Walter Lippmann respectively wrote two books, Public opinion and Popular Government (1913) and Public Opinion (1922). The first book was an attempt to precise investigation of public opinion and its relationship to government. Lowell tended to the greater part of Bryce concerns, especially in terms of the competence of the public, he believed that public opinion’s role in politics had to be severely constrained, due to his lack of competence to manage the political information and due to the negative influence on the making of