Concept
public opinion
In the spiral of silence, public opinion is not a voting total but a means of social control: the opinions a person can express openly without being excluded, or must openly show in order not to be excluded.
Public opinion has two major conceptions: the first, the shared reason that comes out of rational debate among informed citizens (according to Wilke, its best-known defender in Germany was Jürgen Habermas); the second, an invisible form of social control that binds the individual to the community. Noelle-Neumann, on 9 December 1965, devoted her inaugural lecture at the University of Mainz precisely to this second conception: “Public Opinion as Social Control”. Polat likewise reports that she splits approaches to public opinion into two: “public opinion as rationality” and “public opinion as social control”.
The theory’s definition has two parts. On contested, changing issues, public opinion is the opinions a person can state in public without exposing themselves to the risk of isolation. In established tradition, custom and norms, public opinion is the opinions and behaviour you must adopt or show in public if you do not want to be excluded. That is, public opinion is not the total of privately nursed convictions but the total of what can be expressed openly; an opinion that is not expressed cannot be part of public opinion.
In Turkish, the Turkish Language Association (TDK) gives the word “kamuoyu” (public opinion) the meaning of the people’s general thinking on an issue; Noelle-Neumann’s concept loads it with a narrower and more social-control function.
Example
(Hypothetical example.) If, in a student dormitory, a large group is speaking loudly in one direction on a certain issue, the other students in the corridor will voice that issue openly only to the extent they think they can say it without being excluded; “public opinion” in the theory’s sense is what is openly said, not what the students think silently.