Concept
hard core
The minority that is not caught in the spiral and goes on defending its opinion, accepting exclusion (or because it is already excluded). Noelle-Neumann adds the “avant-garde” beside it.
The hard core (German harter Kern) is the first group that the spiral of silence theory treats as an exception. According to Noelle-Neumann, these are people who have already been pushed into a defensive position in public, excluded because of their opinions and therefore with nothing left to lose; though in the minority, they do not fall silent. In the example Griffin reports, Noelle-Neumann gives Don Quixote for this figure: the man who is mocked and beaten but does not give up his chivalric ideals. Polat also writes that on the opposing side of the spiral people gradually fall into silence “except for a certain hard core”.
A second group is added beside it: the avant-garde. These are people such as intellectuals, artists and reformers who see themselves as ahead of their time; they risk exclusion and seek public opinion’s response even though the reaction is usually negative. According to Noelle-Neumann, the chance to change public opinion belongs to these minorities who do not fear exclusion.
Griffin notes that these groups are not part of the theory’s predictions; they are boundary conditions that mark the conditions in which the theory does not work. The Turkish term for the hard core, “sert çekirdek”, appears in this form in at least two Turkish sources.
Example
Noelle-Neumann’s own example: Cervantes’s Don Quixote. While the world around him has long left chivalry behind, he stays loyal to his ideals despite being mocked and defeated.