Public Opinion Infrastructures: Meanings, Measures, Media

A model of public opinion is presented that incorporates and highlights historical knowledge. This model suggests that public opinion is best viewed as an infrastructure consisting of measurement tools, media, and conceptions of public opinion. Using this model, it is possible to gauge opinion, reading "backward" from analysis of cultural artifacts (e.g., film or art) and thereby detecting conceptions of public opinion at work in a given period. The usefulness of this model is demonstrated in a brief analysis of the American film, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, which can be treated as a register of a particular infrastructure of public opinion operative in the 1930s.