The collective will and the ‘ideal’ democratic citizen

‘We, the people, feel and know that we have become more significant than ever before, with the narrowing of the barrier that separates “us” and our range of experiences from our elected representatives and their range of experiences.’ This is what social psychologist, Hadley Cantril, in his 1942 paper, ‘Public Opinion in Flux’, was writing about the importance of ‘good morale’ in American democracy, especially ‘national morale’ associated with the war effort. What Cantril acknowledged in 1942 (and he was not the only one) is what politicians, ‘spin doctors’, and so on take for granted today: the fundament of democracy lies in the ‘faith in the judgment of the common man’. Cantril was writing about the person, the ‘citizen’ who ‘given sufficient facts and motivated to pay attention to those facts … will reach a decision based on his [her] own self-interest as a member of a democratic community’ (1942, p. 151). When writing about ‘we, the people’ Cantril points to the direction of political democratic accountability (from citizens to their elected representatives) and thus brings into the foreground one of the most fundamental political hopes – that the will and reason of ‘the people’ ought to prevail. Cantril’s words express faith in the self-governing, autonomous and omnicompetent citizen (Dalton, 2008) – the ‘ideal’ democratic citizen.

This chapter shows how political psychologists’ concern with the ‘collective will’ is paralleled by a concern with, search for and description of the democratic citizen. The first part of the chapter maps the various meanings and expressions of this collective will condensed into the notion of ‘public opinion’. The chapter then goes on to describe the main assumptions behind researching and understanding the democratic competence of citizens, especially those related to political knowledge and political sophistication.