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Like in the 1970s, in this latter period too, public opinion closely matched elite opinion though more as regards perceptions of the European Union than in relation to self-government. The sharp turnaround in attitudes towards the EU seen in the case of Labour, the STUC and the SNP and the emergence of a split among the Conservatives was almost exactly mirrored at the mass public level as shown by segmentation by party identification. In contrast, the distribution of constitutional preferences was less closely linked to party
7 Public opinion Fresh home after nineteen months in Ruhleben, I have made it my business to inform myself as to the conditions at the Alexandra Palace, where the London Germans are interned. I am amazed at the descriptions given me of the comfort and brightness of everything after the poverty and the suffering of the unhappy prisoners of the Huns.1 Huns and relatives Prisoners became an important theme in the Anglo-German propaganda war, with both sides claiming that the other mistreated captives. Both countries developed sophisticated publicity machines in
The pattern of perceptions and positions seen in the preceding chapters in relation to elite actors was largely replicated at mass public level. Voters had a clear idea of where parties stood on the self-government question and party identification was a very strong predictor of constitutional preferences and of the referendum vote. Labour and Nationalist identifiers were hostile to the EU while Liberal and Conservative identifiers were supportive. This close matching between elite discourse and public opinion substantiates the claim
5 Divining rods and public opinion At 10:00 p.m. on 5 July 1692 thieves broke into the Lyon wine shop owned by Antoine Boubon Savetier and his wife, bludgeoned them to death with a billhook, and escaped with approximately five hundred livres.1 When the local authorities made no progress on the case a wine dealer from Dauphiné stepped forward and recommended the services of Jacques Aymar, a peasant well known for having solved an equally difficult murder case. With little choice the authorities called on Aymar’s help. He arrived in Lyon, inspected the site of the
Loyalty, memory and public opinion in England, 1658-1727 makes an important contribution to the ongoing debate over the emergence of an early modern ‘public sphere’. Focusing on the petition-like form of the loyal address, it argues that these texts helped to foster a politically-aware public through mapping shifts in the national ‘mood’. Covering addressing campaigns from the late Cromwellian to the early Georgian period, it explores the production, presentation, subscription and publication of these texts. Through an in-depth examination of the social background of subscribers and the geography of subscription, it argues that addressing activity provided opportunities to develop political coalitions. By exploring the ritual of drafting and presenting an address, it demonstrates how this form was used strategically by both addressers and government. Both the act of subscribing and the act of presenting an address imprinted this activity in both local and national public memory. The memory of addressing activity in turn shaped the understanding of public loyalty. The volume employs corpus analysis techniques to demonstrate how the meaning of loyalty was transformed over the seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries. The shifts in public loyalty, however, did not, as some contemporaries such as Daniel Defoe claimed, make these professions of fidelity meaningless. Instead, Loyalty, memory and public opinion argues for that beneath partisan attacks on addressing lay a broad consensus about the validity of this political practice. Ultimately, loyal addresses acknowledged the existence of a broad ‘political public’ but did so in a way which fundamentally conceded the legitimacy of the social and political hierarchy
established that its status as an item of public opinion often goes unrecognised, with the result that its history is suppressed. Thus rendered permanently contemporary, the public/private divide is conceived of as a constant, and evidence of its emergence in the past, its alterations over the centuries, and its current deployment in ideological debate, is suppressed also. Literary
Chapter 19 War and Public Opinion in the Nineteenth Century With Napoleon finally defeated and safely out of harm’s way in exile, Europe breathed a huge sigh of relief that peace had at last returned after a generation of war. It is sobering to think that a 25year-old in 1815 would not be able to remember a time when Europe had not been at war. This experience, together with the ideas unleashed by Napoleon and the French Revolution, did not suddenly disappear with the defeat of France. Quite the reverse happened, in fact, as Europe began to reconcile itself to
1 The League of Nations, public opinion and the New Diplomacy The Democratic Spirit may be relied upon if the democratic mind is sufficiently informed. (Lord Robert Cecil, 1920)1 In short, the Union believes that the problem of maintaining world peace is mainly a problem of education. (Report on the Work of the LNU, 1921)2 In the official history rushed out by the LNU in summer 1935, its author justified the Peace Ballot as a unique exercise which had, for the first time, made knowable the will of the people on vital questions of foreign policy. ‘If our
people and bureaucrats ruling over them is under-explored. The colonial administration solicited public opinion, creating a Public Relations Office that monitored press coverage and a Secretariat for Chinese Affairs (SCA) that advised on Chinese customs and assessed shifting trends in public opinion through local Chinese leaders. 3 Historians have, however, a poor
TBA_C01.qxd 08/02/2007 11:19 AM Page 13 1 The rise of the moral agenda and American public opinion Moral and cultural concerns became frontline political issues from the late 1960s onwards.1 In the years that followed President Richard Nixon’s inauguration in January 1969, tensions around questions such as abortion, single parenthood, the role of women and the legitimacy of same-sex relations played an increasingly important and visible role in debates about public policy, the shaping of party loyalties, the appointment of judges and the electoral process. The