K historii sociologie veřejného mínění

The sociology of public opinion underwent its most tumultous development in the period from the second half of the thirties to the end of the forties. Then it was being shaped in close connection with social psychology, especially its part concerned with attitudes. Theoretical concepts of public opinion were modified in connection with the development of ideas of mass society and mass communication. Investigation in the fields of public opinion, mass communication and inter-collective relations was correlated. In spite of all this, during the following decades, the sociological conception of public opinion remained – in the spirit of pervading empiricism – merely a collection of empirically verified hypotheses which were to serve the formation of a possible future „great“ theory. An attempt, in late seventies, to surpass this state is represented by the conception of the „spiral of silence“, whose author is the German sociologist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann. All phenomena of public opinion, according to Noelle, have this in common: they represent a threat of isolation for the individual. Public opinion represents opinions and manners of behaviour one is permitted or required to express in public in order not to be socially isolated. With her conception of public opinion as a conformative pressure and isolation threat. Noelle outlines a picture of communicative processes in which the dominant emotion is one of being threatened, which leads to conformism and suppression of one’s real opinion.