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Public opinion has different meanings depending on whether it acts as a critical authority in connection with a mandate that power be subject to publicity, or whether it acts as a molded object of staged display. The two aspects of publicity and public opinion do not stand in relationship of norm to fact. Critical and manipulative publicity are of different orders. The public behaves in a different way in each manifestation. One is based on public opinion, the other on non-public opinion.
Critical publicity is more than a norm. It determines much of the procedures to which the political exercise and balance of power is bound. Modern states rely on public opinion to legitimate and authorize power but cannot prove its existence. There are two paths to defining public opinion. One leads back to the position of liberalism, which constituted a critical public in the midst of a larger one that merely acclaimed. The element of publicity that guarantees rationality is to be salvaged at the expense of that which guarantees universal accessibility. The other path leads to a concept of public opinion that concentrates solely on institutional criteria. Government and parliament can be seen as mouthpieces of popular opinion or the majority party. The weakness of this theory is that it replaces the public with institutions and makes it nondescript.
Public opinion fully appeared as a problematic entity in the final quarter of the nineteenth century. Habermas analyses the socio-psychological and theoretical interpretations of public opinion. Public opinion became a socio- psychological analysis of group processes. Once public opinion is reduced to group behavior (a category that is between public and private) the articulation of the link between group opinion and public authority is left to the auxiliary science of public administration.
The only meaningful way to study the public sphere is to analyze its development and structural transformation. Conflict between the two types of publicity needs to be taken seriously as a gauge of democratization within the social-welfare state. The concept of public opinion should remain, because the social-welfare state must be seen as one in which the public sphere authorizes the exercise of power. Within this model, two politically relevant areas of communication can be contrasted to each other: informal, non-public opinions and formal, institutionally authorized opinions. Various subdivisions of informal opinion operate; the taken-for-granted, the experiences of your own biography and the things discussed as self-evident by the culture industry. All operate within a group's communication processes.
Formal opinions relate to specific institutions, and circulate narrowly between press and government. They achieve no mutual correspondence with the non- organized mass public. The two spheres are linked by manipulative publicity aimed at creating a following amongst a mediated public. A rare relationship exists between a few critical journals and those few individuals who form their opinions through literature. Strictly public opinion is possible only if the two domains are mediated by critical publicity. acting in intra-organized public spheres. The degree to which opinion is public depends on the degree to which it emerges from this intra-organizational public sphere of an organization's members, and the extent to which that sphere communicates with another public sphere formed by the mass media between state and society. In the conditions of a large social-democratic state, the communicative interconnection of the public can be created only by critical publicity brought to life within intra- organizational public spheres. Modern forms of consensus and conflict could also be altered, because they change as society develops historically. In the case of the structural transformation of the public sphere, we can study the extent, and the way, that it assumes its proper function determines whether the exercise of power and domination remain as negative forces, or are subject to change.
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