Polls and the Awareness of Public Opinion

How well can polls measure public opinion? Should government policies follow majority opinion? Do polls influence elections? Can there be polls under a dictatorship? Recent elections throughout the world have made these issues ever more crucial. Polls and the Awareness of Public Opinion, initially published under the title Silent Politics, the first book to look upon polls and the awareness of poll results as forces that influence public opinion. It is a penetrating assessment of the uses of polls, their misuses, and the absurdities carried out in their name. Bogart argues that predictions based on polls can be misleading since they reflect a transient stage in a public opinion that is constantly and often rapidly changing.