Banca de DEFESA: Karina Damous Duailibe

Uma banca de DEFESA de DOUTORADO foi cadastrada pelo programa.
STUDENT : Karina Damous Duailibe
DATE: 23/02/2023
TIME: 09:00
LOCAL: IPOL
TITLE:

DO SURVEYS AND PUBLIC OPINION SERVE TO DEMOCRACY?

ELEMENTS FOR A REFLECTION

KEY WORDS:

surveys; public opinion; democracy; electoral press coverage; polling; Pierre Bourdieu.

PAGES: 161
BIG AREA: Ciências Humanas
AREA: Ciência Política
SUMMARY:

This doctoral thesis reflects on the relations between surveys and the notion of public opinion. It highlights two aspects: (1) the reconstitution of the historical moment in which surveys become central in the definition of public opinion; (2) the questioning about the democratic premises attributed to both surveys and public opinion. Since the second half of the 18th century, the notion of public opinion had been incorporated into the political vocabulary as a new reality. From the very beginning, it has been linked to the press and the principles of political liberalism. Despite the growing importance it had acquired as a political category of emerging democratic regimes, it has remained shrouded by indetermination, vagueness, opacity and polysemy. When surveys come about, the perspective of measuring public opinion through the aggregation of the opinions of individuals gains centrality, leading to an important change. Praised as democratic devices, surveys have become considered, and widely accepted, as equivalents of public opinion. The implications of this equivalence are profound for the relations between the fields of politics and the media, and for the relationship between who governs and the governed. Electoral media coverage has now become structured based on the use of polls, just as the popularity ratings of the elected by vote have become critical to the exercise of political leadership. Around this new configuration, a whole field of knowledge of public opinion is consolidated - using surveys - to study the political behavior of individuals and democracy itself. The emphasis of the discussion in this thesis converges, then, to the following question: does the notion of public opinion as equivalent to opinion polls represent gains for democracy? In the absence of a consolidated literature based on a more critic perspective, a discussion is presented with the few authors who dedicated themselves to contesting both the equivalence between surveys and public opinion, as well as the democratic postulates of surveys instrument and the notion itself. In conclusion, the argument is for the constitutive fragility of the democratic assumptions of both, which requires greater scrutiny on the use of surveys by the press as an equivalent of public opinion. On the other hand, it is not a question of arguing for the social irrelevance of surveys, especially before the complexity of opinion movements generated in the online environment, and the anti-research rhetoric from the far-right political spectrum. Regarding to public opinion, the point is that it could serve democracy more if the voices and social groups that effectively influence the sphere of political power do not shelter themselves under the opacity and contradictions that the notion of public opinion carries with it.

BANKING MEMBERS:
Externa à Instituição - ALESSANDRA ALDE - UERJ
Externo à Instituição - GILBERTO GONCALVES COSTA - CEUB
Externa ao Programa - 1298914 - LIZIANE SOARES GUAZINA
Presidente - 2211649 - LUIS FELIPE MIGUEL
Interno - 2255715 - THIAGO APARECIDO TRINDADE