j.1351-0487.2004.00362.x

Constellations Volume 11, No 1, 2004. Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

Making the People Speak: The Use of Public Opinion Polls in Democracy

Patrick Champagne

The sociology of Pierre Bourdieu is from the beginning a sociology one can callpolitical in the sense that it was developed in close relation to the great politicalquestions that have shaken French society since the 1950s: first the AlgerianWar;1 then, under Gaullism, false cultural democratization with the policy ofmaisons de la culture; the crisis of the education system as an agent contri-buting to the process of social reproduction; the crisis of political representation;the transformation of the structure of social classes; the critique of neoliberalism;etc. More precisely, this sociology is closely connected to democratic ideology,not because Bourdieu was its nave defender, but because this political ideal canalso be treated as a kind of pure theoretical model, sociology then becoming away of showing the distance from the model, that is to say, the strictly socialobstacles to achieving it. Thus, when we consider the idea of equality of oppor-tunity which was at the heart of Bourdieus first works on the education system,we see that it is an idea that arises from a democratic political field, whichBourdieu treats as a statistical model allowing an accurate measure of the inequal-ity of opportunity, or, if one prefers, the socially established gap between theideal and the reality. This idea, which would be specified in the more operationalconcept of probability of access [to higher education] or objective chances [ofattaining such and such a level], in fact has the strictly scientific aim of recallingthat it is not sufficient to decree equality under the law in order to establish, ipsofacto, equality in fact. Worse still, Bourdieu insists on the fact that, as one seeswith the ideology of emancipatory education that has characterized the opera-tion of French educational institutions for almost a century,2 the political procla-mation of purely formal equality tends to conceal, legitimate, and finallyreinforce real inequalities. Here we see that this sociology is political in a secondsense: it is political to the extent that it allows political action that is better scienti-fically informed, and thereby more effective. Thus, in the conclusion to TheInheritors Bourdieu laid the foundations of a rational pedagogy which, instead ofpostulating the formal equality of the students, would take into account culturalinequality before school so as to make transmission of knowledge more effective,and thus truly democratize education. Similarly, the conclusion of The Love ofArt proposed concrete measures to make museums more accessible to the leasteducated parts of the population. Or, again, we can cite the highly distinctive

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construction of a work like The Weight of the World, which was explicitly conceivedto help sociology achieve the widest possible entry into political debate, the veryambitious object of this book being to contribute to the greatest possible democrat-ization of the discoveries of sociology itself so that everyone could defendhim- or herself against the symbolic violence that is at the heart of processes ofsocial domination.

Formal Democracy and Real DemocracyAdopting a resolutely neo-Kantian approach that was also that of Durkheim,Bourdieu thus questioned from his first works, irrespective of the object, be itmuseum attendance, academic success, or access to the production of personalopinions, what he called the social conditions of possibility of social practicesand behaviors. Just as a true democratization of the education system presup-poses taking into account cultural inequalities before school,3 the establishmentof true political democracy implies taking into account the unequal ability ofindividuals to produce political opinions. The publication of The Inheritors,which showed the unequal probability of young people entering universityaccording to their social origins and the major role played by cultural capital inthe educational culling process, marked a rupture in the domain of educationalsociology as well as education policy. This is the same approach Bourdieuwould later apply when, at the end of the 1960s, the question arose of the reli-ability of the technology of public opinion polls, and secondarily of whethertheir use was legitimate in politics. This question had begun to be posed in1965, when the first French presidential election by universal suffrage saw thisnew practice, entirely controlled by specialists in political science, widelyintroduced into political life. Very quickly the relative technical reliability ofthis first published political poll, which belonged to the highly particularcategory of pre-election polls,4 created a sort of wave of enthusiasm, at oncepolitical and commercial, which led to a proliferation of political polls of allkinds, published and commented upon in the press: voting intention polls, ofcourse more often than not conducted outside election campaigns, whichsubstantially changes their nature but also opinion polls on the most diversesubjects became the order of the day in political life and were conducted not forscientific ends (in order to know, for example, the logic of the production ofopinions in politics), but for the openly political ends of legitimating ordelegitimating (the people are with us (or against you)) the policies of theestablished powers.

This intrusion of a new actor into the operation of the democratic politicalgame did not occur without debates and polemics, first of all in the political field,which was directly concerned, and then in the social sciences. Thus, some pol-iticians asked themselves if any credibility had to be granted to pre-election polls especially when they were carried out several months before voting day and

Making the People Speak: Patrick Champagne 63


whether their predictive value in elections had to be recognized. Others askedthemselves what legitimacy would have to be granted to this new way of graspingpublic opinion, which was henceforth supposed to be captured with the preci-sion and above all with the backing of science. Were not politicians then dispos-sessed of the right to speak and incarnate the popular will by polls, which arepresented as a veritable substitute for direct democracy, the people (or at least asample supposed to be representative of them) henceforth being consulteddirectly and continuously about what they think and want? If some notablyjournalists and political commentators considered the advent of polls into pol-itical life as true democratic progress, others especially politicians producedby the political apparatus were concerned by the growing role of this new socialtechnology which, at least implicitly, presumed to dictate to political officialswhat decisions to take. Would the reading of polls by political scientists not lead,in other words, to a certain demagogy in politics?

Does Public Opinion Exist?The growing importance of polls in political life and, especially in France, theomnipresence of political scientists who design them and comment on them in thepress, led a number of political observers and actors to pose the prejudicialquestion of their scientific value. There would be, in the then-nascent practice ofopinion polling in France, a before and an after Bourdieu, who formulatedthe essence of what was to be said on this question at a lecture given in 1971,published two years later in Les Temps modernes, and entitled, in deliberatelyprovocative fashion, Public Opinion Does Not Exist.5 In the article Bourdieudemonstrated that this new public opinion was a pure artifact, manufactured bypollsters, and, as he explained in conclusion, that it therefore did not exist in thesense implicitly assumed by those who make opinion polls or those who makeuse of the results. This article immediately created quite a stir among politicalscientists and pollsters, these apparent scientists of appearance according toBourdieus murderous formula. For them, it was in effect a sort of scientific callto order for a domain highly invested in the most nave political problematics, andthus constituted a sort of obstacle to their ideological enterprise, which was moreunconscious than conscious. Yet Bourdieu merely recalled some elementary epis-temological principles that impose themselves on all surveys by questionnaire,including opinion surveys. Drawing on the secondary analysis of opinion studiesconducted by polling institutes over a ten-year period in the field of education, aswell as a random sample survey which he had undertaken directly through thepress on the crisis of the education system shortly after the events of May 68,Bourdieu explained that the simple fact of asking a representative sample of thevoting-age population the same closed question, as in a political referendum, andadding up the answers in order to represent political opinion in the form of apercentage (in order to be able to say, for example, that 50% of French people



support such and such a policy measure) rests on a set of presuppositions whichare no doubt those of the democratic political ideology, but are not born out bythe facts and must therefore be grasped as such by scientific analysis. By thus vigor-ously opposing this wild importation of a political problematic into the terrain ofthe social sciences, and by refusing to confuse purely formal democracy, whichsupposes all citizens to be politically competent, with real democracy, withunequally competent social agents, Bourdieu elicited numerous reactions,especially from political scientists, that were closer to political invective than toproperly scientific debate.6

Bourdieus demonstration was nevertheless irresistible, which no doubtexplains why more than 30 years later the article remains a reference in thisdomain. In showing in effect that the simple fact of asking the same question of asample of highly socially and culturally heterogeneous individuals like thosecontinuously asked, for political rather than scientific reasons, by polling insti-tutes then adding together the responses, consists in implicitly postulating threethings. In the first place, such a mechanism of inquiry presupposes that all theindividuals have personal opinions, which is refuted not only by random samplesurveys but also by the distribution of non-responses in the inquiries conductedby the polling institutes themselves. In the second place, asking closed questions,which leads to collecting not opinions but preformed answers to opinion ques-tions, implies the hypothesis that all those surveyed ask themselves the questionsthat are asked of them (or at least that they would be able to ask them), which isrefuted, here again, by all the comprehension tests on the meaning of the ques-tions made among those surveyed. Finally, in the third place, adding up theanswers thus obtained presupposes that all the opinions are equivalent and havethe same social weight, even though everything indicates that the capacity ofindividuals to impose their opinion on the political field is strongly connected tothe power of the social groups that can be mobilized, as well as to social status,relational capital, and the positions individuals occupy in the class structure. Inshort, Bourdieu recalled that opinions only count politically when they are carriedby social forces.

With this article, which was deliberately published in an intellectual ratherthan a strictly scientific journal, Bourdieu wanted to struggle at once politicallyand scientifically against the belief, already highly prevalent in the press and inpolitical circles, in the scientificity of the practice of opinion polling. He wantedto make it understood outside the scientific community that polling institutes notonly do not measure true movements of opinion, but authorize all the misrepre-sentations of the responses to their questionnaires that arise because they weremade in total ignorance of the facts by those surveyed in short, that these insti-tutes were engaged in a sort of illegitimate exercise of science. He finally recalledthat the pollsters public opinion obscures a much more real public opinionthan the one they manufacture on their computer printouts, to wit, that which isconstructed by the public action of the interest groups traditional political science



knows very well and refers to under the notion of lobbies or pressure groups,which cannot be reduced to a simple percentage in abstraction from the tensionsthat permeate the social structure.

Reasons for the Rejection of Polling in FranceBourdieus political-scientific intervention, which prefigured in many respectsthose he would engage in starting in 1996 with the small books of the Liber-Raisons dAgir collection, came at an opportune moment, just as the practice ofpolling was being widely diffused in politics and the press. The success of thispractice was new, although attempts to introduce it in France had gone on wellbefore the 1960s, governments having ordered numerous studies since the end ofthe Second World War through the French Institute for Public Opinion (IFOP).This institute, the first of its kind, had been created in 1939 by a French academic,Jean Stoetzel, on the model of Gallup in the United States. But its polls had littlepublic impact and hence little effect on the political game. This was first of allbecause the results remained highly confidential and were neither published orcommented upon, and therefore in a certain sense did not exist politically, butabove all because everything seems to indicate that their sponsors themselves didnot really know what to do with the results of these peculiar micro-electoral con-sultations. We can nevertheless ask if politicians actually granted these surveyssome credit, and everything gives rise to the impression that they in fact did not(much) believe in the information opinion polls supplied. And why should theybelieve in them when the press, which is to say readers and therefore voters, didnot believe in them either certain large-circulation newspapers, after a few fruit-less attempts, having finally given up ordering polls with a view to publication,and these studies, held in very low regard by the serious papers, having had noobservable effect on sales.

There were sociological reasons for the lack of interest in this politicaltechnology. They lie at once in the institutional functioning of the political fieldin the Fourth Republic and in the effective political representations of publicopinion that held sway in this space, taking into account the logics that governedit. On the one hand, what political scientists have called the party regime, aswell as electoral laws that particularly distorted the representation of politicalforces, made any serious prediction of the future composition of the NationalAssembly and, a fortiori, of the naming of heads of government, which was ofprincipal interest, if not to the voters, at least to political actors and journalists almost impossible on the basis of polls of the voting intentions of the electoralbody alone. This accordingly made this type of survey of little practical interest.On the other hand, as witnessed by, among other things, the little mass-marketbook Alfred Sauvy devoted to public opinion in 1956,7 what in practice wentunder this notion at the time had more to do with the strategies of pressure groups



and changing sectoral mobilizations around particular issues than with thereferendum-type general consultations survey polls could produce (or create theillusion of producing).

No doubt, certain politicians, following the example of F.D. Roosevelt,sought by recourse to modern means of communication (radio, then television)to short-circuit the games of the parliamentary microcosm by directly and regu-larly addressing the electorate, that is by calling public opinion as witness forthe policies undertaken. These initiatives, generally frowned upon by thepolitical microcosm because they aimed to short-circuit it, can in hindsight beconsidered the basis for the very general transformation that would characterizethe functioning of the political field and that would later call upon the techno-logy of polling. But until General de Gaulles rise to power in 1958, politicsplayed out essentially in parliament, or, more precisely, in the corridors of theNational Assembly, and in the party headquarters, where the often ephemeralpolitical alliances were negotiated. Marx said that capitalists dreamed ofbourgeois society without the proletariat; some analysts of the French politicalsystem said at the time that the Fourth Republic had succeeded in establishingdemocracy without the people.

The institutional changes that marked the advent of the Fifth Republic in 1958for a time marginalized the deputies in favor of the executive. The direct andfrequent consultation of the electoral body by General de Gaulle upon his returnto power, through referenda and direct national television addresses which werethen new (and denounced by the opposition parties), though they seemed almostto have been called forth by the generalized diffusion of this new media (thediffusion of television in France dates from the 1960s) and the highly excep-tional political circumstances of the time (the settlement of the Algerian conflict),helped impose the idea that public opinion was not that of the elected deputiesbut of the whole electorate directly consulted.

The establishment, by referendum in 1962, of the election of the president byuniversal suffrage reinforced a seemingly ineluctable process which, since thebeginning of the nineteenth century, had continually tended to enlarge, in stepespecially with the populations level of education and the development ofmodern means of communication, what the political field places under the rubricof public opinion. It was no longer, as at the beginning of the nineteenthcentury, the opinions publicly debated by the elected representatives of a peoplethat was still mostly illiterate and rural, and thus politically marginalized; nor, asat the beginning of the twentieth century, the opinions publicly expressed bythose, like journalists and union representatives, who considered themselvesthe true spokespersons of the popular classes or the electorate, which is to sayOpinion; nor even of the fraction of citizens who mobilized around a givenproblem and publicly demonstrated their will through public marches. The publicopinion which progressively came to be considered legitimate, and which for thatreason had to be taken into account in political decision-making, now tended to



be that of citizens as a whole, the problem now being to know who could saywhat the people think and want.8

Making the People SpeakAs a result of this change, the public opinion that progressively emerged in the1960s was no longer immediately knowable, since it could no longer bereduced to the noisy public positions taken by the leaders of opinion or thespectacular marches of activists or protestors. It was principally made, accord-ing to an expression that would appear at the end of the 1960s (and especiallyafter May 68), by the silent majorities, who thus had to be made to speak inorder to be known. Polling institutes, largely composed of political scientists,would be the instrument of this veritable process of inversion, which explainsthe reticence and resistance of a large fraction of the political world with regardto the new technology. In effect, public opinion was no longer the (rather free)addition of the opinions of those who had opinions about a given problem andwho, above all, mobilized to make them publicly known, to imposing themon political decision-makers by means of lobbying or spectacular publicactions; it was the product of the mobilization of researchers who soughtanswers among a sample of the non-mobilized majority of individuals neverthe-less supposed to be statistically representative of the whole electoral body. Inother words, public opinion would henceforth tend to be politically constructedby interrogating a sample of a population, the great majority of who, asBourdieu recalled in the article cited above, had no preformulated opinions onthe problem posed to them imposed on them by the questionnaire, and whowere even less ready to defend them and impose them on political officials. Inthe political field there thus arose a new ideological couple: the active minori-ties, who are unrepresentative of the electoral body, and the silent majority,who are politically representative but inactive. To the extent that politial actionis almost always the product of the action of concerned and determined minoritieswho try to drag along the quiet, non-mobilized, unconcerned majority, who donot see the need to change the world, we see why this irruption of publicopinion polls into political life was perceived as a conservative, if not rightist,political initiative.

Pierre Bourdieu had effected a veritable revolution in the social sciences byshowing, for many of the objects that then gave rise to endless scholastic debates(do social classes exist? how can culture be defined? what is a true intellect-ual? etc.),9 that the sociologist did not have to impose his own definition ofthese semi-scientific concepts (by false preliminary definitions of the type, Bysocial class or intellectual or culture, I refer to . . . , which destroy the objectof scientific inquiry in advance), but should take as his or her object the strictlysocial struggles in which these concepts and the social functions they fulfill are atstake. To extend Bourdieus analysis on this point, we see that it is thus with the



idea of public opinion, which cannot give rise to a scientific definition, associologists and political scientists think, since the putting into numerical formthey are engaged in is nothing but giving form to political common sense, or, ifone prefers, to democratic doxa. The quick reminder of the history of the idea ofpublic opinion we just sketched suffices to show that there is no definition initself of public opinion since it is a notion that arises from political metaphysics not from science, but only from groups of agents who, in light of their systems ofinterests, each try to impose their own definition. It is also for this reason that theconcrete content of the notion of public opinion is necessarily variable, since it isclosely connected to a given historical state of the political field and depends onthe relations of forces between actors in the political game. In other words, thesociologist can only note a social definition of this notion and try to explain it.We can then see the veritable symbolic mugging that was effected by politicalscientists with the silent support of the whole weight of the political structure: itresides essentially in the fact that they made people believe that a scientificdefinition of this idea was possible or, what amounts to the same, that the merefact of expressing it in percentage form allowed the transmutation of a politicallyuncertain and therefore contestable idea into a scientific concept that would there-after be indisputable.

What were the effects of the irruption of polls and this new idea of publicopinion on the political game and decision-making? Pollsters first intervened inthe electoral process by providing voting intentions in the form of exact figuresbefore the election, which practically amounted to an election prediction. It wasa large-circulation popular paper, France-Soir, and not a political paper likeLe Monde, that first published this type of poll in 1965, on the occasion of thefirst election by universal suffrage. The risk of error as well as the fear of thepotential effects of publication on the election results nevertheless worried thejournalists enough that the daily took some precautions: according to the well-known journalistic technique that consists of running a for and an against (ina letter to the reader, for example), the paper reported on two polls with contra-dictory results one by the IFOP, which, contrary to what was thought by nearlyall political commentators, predicted a victory for General de Gaulle in the firstround; the other from a state information service, which predicted the election ofthe departing president in the first round. This first displayed the know-how ofspecialists in electoral sociology to which the polling institutes had appealed andon which they would lastingly rely. It was in fact the relative reliability of the firstpre-election polls that explains the attempts at manipulation that would quicklyfollow: the political world and the journalists would use the pre-election poll forpolitical ends and would try especially to influence the decisions of the electorsand political officials. Newspapers and political parties would have a growingnumber of polls produced and published whose questions were more or lessbiased (the fame of x, the electoral chances of y, etc.) and even run completelyimaginary or faked polls by phantom agencies. In fact, these fake polls became



sufficiently numerous that politicians decided to put a stop to them in 1977 bycreating a supervisory commission charged with verifying the reality of studies andthe fairness of the questions posed.

A Recurring DebateIt must be said that this new practice was established in a context which largelyexplains the fact that it was first mostly perceived as manipulative and thusprejudicial to the dignity of political struggle and universal suffrage. The electoralcampaign of this first presidential election by universal suffrage was marked bythe arrival of publicists who, with evident success, devised the electoral cam-paigns and managed to sell certain candidates by using, as in the United States,methods from the economic domain. And to the extent that these new specialistsin political communication relied fundamentally, like their American counter-parts whose techniques they imported to France, on economic marketingtechniques, that is, on polling studies (to test the candidates image and the cam-paign themes with various categories of electors and to follow the effects of thecampaign day by day), one will understand that this technology was stronglydenounced by the most traditional fraction of the political class all the more sobecause these surveys were apparently not without practical efficacy. If theydecried the fact that certain candidates were being sold like soap, this was alsobecause these techniques seemed to work.

Pre-election studies proliferated, but so did studies by political scientists on theeffects of these studies on the electorates voting. Didnt these polls threatenthe electoral logic symbolized by the polling booth? Didnt they seek to influencethe voters decision by giving him or her the result of the vote in advance?Shouldnt the voter be left to decide according to his or her conscience? Didntthe publication of voting intentions, which were largely presented and perceivedas predictions, modify the voters intentions, especially given the more or lesspartisan commentaries that accompanied their publication? As a result, politicalscientists tried to discern the effects that the publication just before an election ofits foreseeable result could have on voters. Wouldnt it demobilize the voters ofthe party that was supposed to carry the day and mobilize its opponents? Or thereverse? According to the analysts, who were generally delighted with thisbecause it confirmed them in their self-attributed role of purely objective observ-ers, of scientists objectively analyzing the electoral campaign, exerting noeffects on the political game but restricted only to analyzing it, all French andAmerican studies seemed to show that pre-election polls had absolutely no effecton the vote because very few voters changed their votes as a result and, besides,these changes, according to the studies, would be miraculously split among all thecamps and so tend to cancel one another out.

Although the practice of polling is now totally integrated into the functioningof the political field, we see this debate on polling in politics reappear in the



media with each election, with the same exchange of arguments that haveprevailed for more than 30 years. On one side are the partisans of polls (thosewho are for), political scientists as well as large fractions of the political andmedia milieu who regard themselves as modernists and liberals: they defendthis technique, which they judge to be democratic and scientific and whichthey claim contributes to political debate to the extent that polls give citizensand politicians reliable information that allows them to reach decisions knowingall the eventualities. On the other side, the opponents (those who are against),who are also to be found among politicians and journalists, but especially inintellectual circles: the reasons they invoke, which are similarly both political andscientific, appear no less well founded. Taking up to a greater or lesser extentcertain criticisms formulated by Bourdieu, they contest the reliability of polls,excessively weak samples, dubious analysis of the results, badly posed questions,and misinterpretation of the responses. They explain that these polls, which areoften faked or irrelevant, disturb the voters peace at the moment of voting andcontribute to altering the normal result of elections. In short, for some polls areperfectly integrated into democratic political life, while for others they pervert itsubstantially.

Presidential election campaigns, because of the very excesses they give rise toin this domain (during the three or four months preceding the election the pressreports a voting intention poll practically every day), are especially revealing ofthe tensions at work in the political field. The introduction of polling into thishighly peculiar playing field has done nothing but carried the debate to newheights. Pollsters are at once omnipresent and heavily criticized, often for badreasons. Politicians who do not hesitate to invoke polls when they are favorableare quick to denounce them when they are unfavorable. Similarly, journalists whoare responsible for placing polls at the heart of election campaigns are not the lastto criticize them or to report, often too late, the precautions that need to be takenwhen interpreting the results (the margin of error, the instantaneous character ofthe poll, which is valid only at the time it was conducted, etc.), especially whenthe election results fail to confirm the predictions the specialists believed theywere able to make on the basis of pre-election polls, as was the case in France inthe 1995 presidential election and even more so during the 2002 presidentialelection.10

An Expanding MarketIt would be nave to think that Bourdieus article could have been sufficient to putan end to this ideological use of opinion polls. The practical functions they fulfillare such that politicians and journalists no longer seem able to do without them.This no doubt has to do in large part with the fact that polls are explicitlyconceived and adjusted to respond to their most immediate preoccupations, suchthat, even when misinterpreted, these surveys supply them with useful data



which, because they are structured according to the very logic of the politicalfield, have greater predictive value, in principle, than the intuitive, unmethodicalevaluations they relied on before.

Politicians are, obviously, these institutes clients of choice. They supply themwith confidential data in order to formulate strategy as well as for publication inorder to produce political effects. Public opinion polls allow the construction ofindicators (signals) of the state of opinion or are then published and used as aspecific political resource when it is necessary, for example, to make peoplebelieve that a majority of citizens support such and such an opinion or measure(legitimation effect). As for pre-election polls, they allow the prospects of politicalleaders to be tested and thereby influence the choice of candidates (instrumentof prediction or simulation). It is generally known that polling institutes areincreasingly consulted to orient day-to-day government policy (at least withregard its public dimension) as well as the electoral campaigns of different par-ties. In particular, they allow them to follow candidates ratings as a function ofhow they play in the media, and help determine the themes that, because theybest bring together voters, can be played up in political programs. They equallygive party headquarters an idea of the foreseeable relations of forces and thus helpthem define strategies of political rallying or regrouping. If, incontestably, theintroduction of polling has modified the representation of political activity, itremains that this practice is inscribed very directly into the logic of the most tradi-tional political work, which consists notably in translating options and choicesconceived and worked out in the restricted domain of political professionals intopropositions able to garner the greatest possible support of the unwashed or, moreprecisely, the categories of the population specifically targeted by each partygiven its position in the field. The political poll is thus inscribed into a verygeneral process of the rationalization of action (a decision-making aid, as thepollsters say), equally observable in the economic sector, which uses, amongother things, resources that can be supplied by the social sciences.

But, however numerous, the polls ordered by political headquarters are notthose that give rise to public debate. In fact, most of these polls are ignored by thebroader public, and even by journalists, because they remain unpublished and arereserved for the political marketing specialists now present in all parties, prepar-ing and following the candidates campaigns. This is not the case of polls orderedby the press, which are explicitly intended to be published and commented upon.For if political polls have met with no less success among the media (especiallythe national broadcast media) than among political actors, the fact that they arepublished produces effects on the political game that are no less important forbeing much more visible. The success of political polls among journalists rests,first of all, as among politicians, on the fact that this type of survey seems asnatural as an election, to which is added the apparent scientific rigor that wouldrender them incontestable. The methodological problems they pose, raised byBourdieu, do not seem to be well understood or taken into account by journalists,



in large part because their training in the social sciences is weak, but also becausethe logic of the media inclines them more toward simplification or at the veryleast to a political reading of these polls than to their detailed analysis. This typeof inquiry in effect constitutes a product that is particularly well adapted to thestrictly technical and political constraints on the production of information today.Unlike the traditional man-in-the-street interviews of the audiovisual media,11they allow rapidity to be joined to the external signs of science: their numericalpresentation has the appearance of objectivity and neutrality, qualities that areformally appealed to by the large television networks. They also allow eventsand scoops to be manufactured practically at will (A Surprising New PollReveals That . . . , Exclusive: The French Judge America, etc.). They thus havea suppleness that is well suited to the imperatives of currentness and competition.But it is above all in the political domain that the practice of polling has becomemost widespread, no doubt because these surveys allow journalists (especially inthe audiovisual sector) to intervene directly into political struggle with a legiti-macy of their own and enable them to interview politicians without taking theuncomfortable position of merely featuring them or, what amounts to the same,of being engaged journalists. Journalists have become, thanks to polls, the sci-entifically guaranteed spokesmen of what the people (which is to say the televi-sion audience) really think, popularity ratings and public opinion polls beinginquiries that are all the more incontestable for politicians insofar as they orderthem themselves. As for voting intention polls, they help create real suspense inan election campaign which, day by day, helps sustain the interest of readers andviewers, the majority of who are not much interested in political debates, withwhat may be complex, difficult, specialized, and thus uninteresting. In short, pollsmake possible an attractive presentation of political struggle modeled on sportscompetition or the showdown of personalities, which are more familiar to thebroader public.

Political Critique and Scientific CritiqueThe most radical (and also the most effective) critique of polls in politics wouldconsist in the press no longer ordering them and no longer publishing their results in short, like Le Monde until the end of the 1970s, in deliberately ignoring them.If this kind of critique-through-action has hardly been practiced by the media,there exists, to the contrary, a routinized critique of polls that has been integratedinto the practice itself. Everything happens as if this critique came as the counter-point to the intense publicization of polls, expressing a sort of persistent badconscience among political journalists who consume them in a manner whichthey themselves find excessive, perhaps because they intuitively perceive itsnegative effects on democratic debate. This sort of complementary critique,which is common in the major media, in the last analysis allows the almost dailypublication of polls all the while giving the impression of not believing in them or



attaching too much importance to them: journalists publish percentages, but oftenwith a hint of irony or apparent distance (its only a poll . . . , if the latest poll isto be believed . . . ) intended to communicate a certain incredulity to the public.And when papers decide, as they do every general election, to publish a specialreport denouncing the large-scale manipulation of polls, it is most of the timeonly another occasion to indirectly publicize different polling institutions, whoserepresentatives are presented to their best advantage and invited to justify them-selves at length.

Even critiques that appear to situate themselves on strictly scientific terrain infact almost always remain on that of politics. Thus, when pollsters are criticized,it is not because, as Bourdieu showed, the practice is in itself deceptive, but onlybecause the pollsters were deceived in not predicting the candidates exact scores.Here we have in fact a circumstantial critique which, in all logic, signifies thatthese same pollsters would have been eulogized by these very same people if, asis often the case, their predictions had been closer to the actual scores. In thatcase, their astonishing science would have been praised. A debate would havebeen proposed, not on the validity of polls, but on the utility of voting, since asimple pre-election poll seems able to call the election in an almost infalliblemanner. Polling would have been praised as a rational instrument of democracythat allows economies over traditional procedures, which, like elections or refer-enda, would be judged archaic, too cumbersome, and too costly in time andmoney.

In fact, what media debates on polls always overlook is that the introduction ofthis technology into public debate has profoundly affected the legitimate repre-sentations of political practice by overturning especially among politicalprofessionals the elementary structures of the perception of politics and therules that hitherto prevailed in electoral competition. When all is said and done,political polls allow one to know too well what has to be said to the electorate tofool it (at least in the short term) and to tell it what it wants to hear. Politicalpolling, which opened the way to political marketing, tends to align the logic ofthe political field with that of the economic field, no doubt partly contributing tothe crisis of faith in the political game observed today in many democracies, asseen in the growing electoral abstention rate. Insofar as they do not serve toanalyze the operation of the political field, as Bourdieu suggested, but insinuatethemselves within the logic of its operation, polls tend to be nothing but an instru-ment for the rational manipulation of election campaigns, candidates now beingable to know day-by-day the effect of their public statements and promises onvoting intentions. Far from helping democracy progress toward the ideal itclaims to incarnate, polls have become the instrument of political cynicism parexcellence. By conducting these kinds of mini-referenda, which claim to measurepublic opinion, that is, the popular will, in a precise, incontrovertible, contin-uous way, pollsters can only contribute to weakening the representative logiccharacteristic of the earlier condition of the democratic regime, which no doubt



created a rupture between political professionals and the unwashed, but was alsoan obstacle to demagogy. Democracy presupposes spaces of debate, time forreflection, and the diffusion of useful information so that citizens can make uptheir minds with full knowledge of the facts in short, a set of conditions whichare eliminated by the practice of polling in politics.

(Translated by James Ingram)

NOTES

1. See, respectively, Bourdieu and Abdelmalek Sayad, Le Dracinement. La crise de lagricul-ture algrienne (Paris: Minuit, 1964); Bourdieu with Alain Darbel and Dominique Schnapper, TheLove of Art: European Art Museums and Their Public (Cambridge: Polity, 1990); Bourdieu andJean-Claude Passeron, Les Hritiers. Les tudiants et la culture (Paris: Minuit, 1966); Bourdieu andPasseron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (London: Sage, 1977); several articles onpolitical representation published in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales (including TheMystery of the Ministry: From Particular Wills to the General Will, in this issue); Distinction: ASocial Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); andBourdieu et al., The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society (Cambridge:Polity, 1999). On the fusion between sociological research and political critique in Bourdieusintellectual practice more generally, cf. Poupeau and Discepolo in this issue.

2. The ideology of liberating education is very closely connected to the establishment of sec-ular, free, mandatory primary school at the beginning of the Third Republic in France. It postulatesthe formal equality of the students before academic verdicts and sees the economic inequality offamilies as the only source of inequality in school, which alone would be the object of academicelimination. The system of scholarships granted by the state to worthy students from impoverishedfamilies is charged with correcting inequalities before school.

3. The scare quotes signify only that sociology does not claim to give a scientific definitionof real democracy an object of interminable debates because it is political by nature but thatthe simple comparison between what democratic ideology claims to realize and the reality it pro-duces by itself effects increased awareness.

4. We must recall here that a pre-election poll is not a survey strictly speaking. It is only atechnical mechanism that consists, in the same forms as political consultation, and toward purelypractical ends, in producing the vote some days or weeks before an election in order to anticipate itsprobable result. Comparison of the pre-electoral poll with the results of voting allows the quality ofthe mechanism and the pertinence of the methods by which it is adjusted to be verified, with a viewto correcting the bias in the distribution of questionnaires (notably, a biased sample and insincereresponses). We will note that such verification is strictly speaking only possible to the extent thatthere is, in this case, no consultation with the whole of the population. To give an idea of the gapsthat can separate a mere poll based on a sample of the population from a national election with thepolitical mobilization that it necessarily involves, we need only cite the example of the approval ofthe Maastricht Treaty, which in 1993, after having been submitted to a referendum, apparently wonmore than 70% for as against at most 51% some months later.

5. Bourdieu,Lopinion publique nexiste pas, Les Temps Modernes 318 (January 1973) :12921309 (as part of the publication of a January 1971 conference by the Noriot circle at Arras). This articlewas reprinted in Questions of Sociology (Middletown, CN: Wesleyan University Press, 1980). Bourdieureturned to the problem of opinion polls and the production of political opinions on four other occasions:Les doxosophes, Minuit 1 (1972): 2645; Le hit-parade des intellectuels, Actes de la recherche ensciences sociales 52/53 (1984); Distinction, ch. 4; In Other Words: Essays Toward a Reflexive Sociology(Cambridge: Polity, 1990 [1987]), ch. 12.



6. To give an idea of the level on which political scientists situated the debate, we will men-tion only that they accused Bourdieu and myself of being enemies of public opinion, of beingagainst democracy, in short, of being partisans of totalitarian states in which polls are forbidden. Onthis point, see my De la doxa lorthodoxie politologique, Actes de la recherche en sciencessociales 101/102 (March 1994).

7. In the Presses Universitaires de France series Que sais-je?8. On this point, see my Faire lopinion. Le nouveau jeu politique (Paris: Minuit, 1989),

esp. ch. 1.9. See esp. Bourdieu, Distinction, for a discussion of the idea of social classes; The Love of

Art for a discussion of the idea of culture; and Christophe Charle, Naissance des intellectuels:18801900 (Paris: Minuit, 1990), for a social history of the idea of the intellectual.

10. In 1995, the Socialist candidate, Lionel Jospin, was expected by pre-election polls to placesecond or even third in the first round although he placed a clear first; conversely, in 2002 he wasexpected to place first or second in the first round but found himself in third place and waseliminated from competition in the second round.

11. Short interviews with random passers-by conducted by radio and television journalists.They aim above all to represent the populations reaction to a political measure or event and have norepresentative value.

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