http://www.deliberatelyconsidered.com/2011/05/jurgen-habermas-on-power-to-the-polls/ Informed reflection on the events of the day Wed, 15 Jul 2015 17:00:00 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.4.23 http://www.deliberatelyconsidered.com/2011/05/jurgen-habermas-on-power-to-the-polls/comment-page-1/#comment-10875 Fri, 27 May 2011 18:19:00 +0000 http://www.deliberatelyconsidered.com/?p=5413#comment-10875 An interesting and useful article – thanks. In many ways Habermas is recapitulating here arguments made in the Frankfurt School’s Gruppenexperiment (translations recently available: Vol. 1, Vol. 2), for which Habermas was an assistant. Similar arguments underlie his Student und Politik as well.

]]> http://www.deliberatelyconsidered.com/2011/05/jurgen-habermas-on-power-to-the-polls/comment-page-1/#comment-10860 Fri, 27 May 2011 16:55:00 +0000 http://www.deliberatelyconsidered.com/?p=5413#comment-10860 Nice article. I think it’s a serious issue as to how, in the United States, politicians use polls or ignore polls; there are such a multitude of polls taken to measure public opinion on key issues or on the popularity of this or that politician, that one can sometimes pick the poll which best bolsters their position. In that sense, they are used within political discourse to legitimate a position taken on an issue. When they don’t bolster a position however the politician might change his or her stance and take a stand “based on principle” rather than public opinion. Ultimately, public opinion polling is a murky business; often through electioneering, via scare tactics used just before a poll, careful wording of a polling question, or with just the right selective sampling frame the desired polling numbers can be generated. “Who controls and owns the polls?” is also a question worth asking given the ways in which polling outcomes can be manipulated. Rasmussen for example is clearly tilted towards the conservative end of the ideological spectrum. There’s certainly enough reasons to not take polling numbers too seriously, but politicians will often be selective about when they do or don’t do this depending on whether they see an opportunity or not. That is, I don’t think opinion polls are the biggest culprit here although I would agree that they certainly can be detrimental to the democratic process.

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