Making the People Speak: The Use of Public Opinion Polls in Democracy.

The sociology of Pierre Bourdieu is from the beginning a sociology one can call political in the sense that it was developed in close relation to the great political questions that have shaken French society since the 1950s. With this article, which was deliberately published in an intellectual rather than a strictly scientific journal, Bourdieu wanted to struggle at once politically and scientifically against the belief, already highly prevalent in the press and in political circles, in the scientificity of the practice of opinion polling. He wanted to make it understood outside the scientific community that polling institutes not only do not measure true movements of opinion, but authorize all the misrepresentations of the responses to their questionnaires that arise because they were made in total ignorance of the facts by those surveyed. He finally recalled that the pollsters' public opinion obscures a much more real public opinion than the one they manufacture on their computer printouts.