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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Reading Public Opinion: How Political Actors View the Democratic Process

Reading Public Opinion: How Political Actors View the Democratic Process

Herbst, Susan

Paperback

Series: Studies in Communication, Media, and Public Opinion

General Political ScienceUnited States Politics

ISBN10: 0226327477
ISBN13: 9780226327471
Publisher: Univ Of Chicago Pr
Published: Oct 11 1998
Pages: 266
Weight: 0.84
Height: 0.79 Width: 6.30 Depth: 9.09
Language: English
Public opinion is one of the most elusive and complex concepts in democratic theory, and we do not fully understand its role in the political process. Reading Public Opinion offers one provocative approach for understanding how public opinion fits into the empirical world of politics. In fact, Susan Herbst finds that public opinion, surprisingly, has little to do with the mass public in many instances.

Herbst draws on ideas from political science, sociology, and psychology to explore how three sets of political participants-legislative staffers, political activists, and journalists-actually evaluate and assess public opinion. She concludes that many political actors reject the voice of the people as uninformed and nebulous, relying instead on interest groups and the media for representations of public opinion. Her important and original book forces us to rethink our assumptions about the meaning and place of public opinion in the realm of contemporary democratic politics.

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