ABSTRACT
Conceiving public opinion as unwritten law, or as an informal mechanism of social control, is hardly new; indeed, one scholar (Noelle-Neumann, 1995) traced the notion back to antiquity and the writings of Pericles and the Old Testament. It can be found in the treatises of philosophers and scholars of many different eras and nations as well, including John Locke, James Bryce, Floyd Allport, Alexis de Tocqueville, Jacques Ellul, and others. For example, James Madison (1788/1961), writing in Federalist Paper No. 49, implicitly adopted this conceptualization:
The strength of opinion in each individual, and its practical infl uence on his conduct, depends much on the number which he supposes to have entertained the same opinion. The reason of man, like man himself, is timid and cautious when left alone, and acquires fi rmness and confi dence in proportion to the number with which it is associated. (p. 340)
In this century, sociologist W. Philips Davison (1958) drew on the notion of social control in his classic description of the public opinion process:
Therefore, [people] are likely to speak or act in one way if they anticipate approbation and to remain silent or act in another way if they anticipate hostility or indifference…. People who do not share the opinions expressed by the crowd’s leaders are likely to remain silent, fearing the disapproval of those around them. This very silence isolates others who may be opposed, since they conclude that, with the exception of themselves, all those present share the same attitude. (p. 101)
The most elaborate development of this approach to public opinion, however, is found in the work of Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, founder and director of the Public Opinion Research Center in Allensbach, Germany, and professor of communication research at the University of Mainz. To her, public opinion refers to “opinions on controversial issues that one can express in public without isolating oneself” (Noelle-Neumann, 1984, pp. 62-63), a conceptualization in which communication processes and effects fi gure prominently. Since publication of her work in English in the early 1970s, her model of the spiral of silence has attracted considerable scholarly attention, some in the form of attempts at social scientifi c tests and replication, others in the form of sometimes scathing criticism and commentary. The story of the scholarly evolution of the spiral of silence model is one of science inextricably intertwined with politics, personalities, and the long shadows of history.
