Public Opinion And The Public Sphere

The importance of an informed, knowledgeable electorate dictates that democratic politics must be pursued in the public arena (as distinct from the secrecy characteristic of autocratic regimes). The knowledge and information on the basis of which citizens will 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 collectivelly 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 Jurgen 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 Pursey, 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 [autocratic] 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 coffe-house and salon cultures of Britain and France, debate and political critique became, for the first time, pupblic 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.
The public sphere, as can be seen, comprises in essence the communicative institutions of a society, through which facts and opinions circulate and by means of which a common stock of knowledge is built up as basis for collective political action: in other words, the mass media, which since the eighteenth century have evolved into the main source and focuses of a society’s shared experience. The modern concept of ‘news’ developed precisely as a means of furnishing citizens with the most important information, from the point of view of their political activities, and of streamlining and guiding public discussion, functions which are taken for granted in contemporary print and broadcast journalism.

reference:
McNair, Brian., An Introduction To Political Communication Third Edition, London, Routledge, 1995, pp. 18-21.