Vignettes

Public Opinion and the State

Last summer in far-away Denmark, the Prime Minister’s Office spent approximately 1 million dollars (in a nation of 5.4 million) on a campaign endorsing a constitutional amendment. The issue—whether to abolish male-preference primogeniture in the royal family—might seem minor, but it was indicative of a style of heavy-handed politics that should be of major concern.

The campaign largely consisted of a TV-spot that satirized opponents of the amendment. The backlash that followed focused whether public monies should be spent telling the citizens how to vote, and was quite unexpected, since the amendment itself was essentially non-controversial. However, it failed to trigger a larger debate, which is shocking, since the government spends millions every year promoting all sorts of causes — so many and so often, in fact, that it took a nation-wide campaign telling the citizens how to vote in an upcoming referendum for the line to be crossed.

Publically funded canvassing is a key tool in the extensive Danish welfare system, and usually comes in the form of anti-smoking, anti-drinking or anti-obesity campaigns. While Denmark took little part in the world wars, its state information campaigns are reminiscent of the information campaigns used in wartime recruitment drives, and share a common origin in the mass education, vaccination and sanitation attempts of the time. Nowadays, they come in all shapes and sizes (but not persuasions, mind you) — in one memorable case, the Ministry of Taxation paid for dramatic posters of the run-down schools and closed hospitals Denmark would have if people failed to pay their taxes (which currently amount to about 50% of GDP).

Private actors help to legitimize this information policy, such as when newspapers order polls and immediately call for officials to launch campaigns, when the public fails to live up to the standards of liberal propriety. Progressives, always more comfortable with state-driven modernization, seize the day, and sympathetic members of the general public will ask politicians to run an anti-smoking campaign – for its own sake. Thus, these campaigns have become regular features of public policy.

Participants in the public debate — citizens — discuss what the citizens think, ought to think and how they could be made to think what they ought. Real politics are sidelined by meta-politics, the politics of politic. One wonders, in the words of Bertolt Brecht, if it “wouldn’t be easier for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?” Or preferably: if democracy does not imply that public opinion should guide policy, and the not the other way around?

Conservatives and libertarians should question whether the state ought to be the prime motor in shaping public opinion. While it is true that all governments try to influence public opinion –it is an unavoidable aspect of statecraft – it is equally true that that can also undermine faith in democracy: If the citizens can’t be trusted to have the right opinions, how can they be trusted to vote?