The politics of opinion: Individuals, groups, and the social psychology of opinion in the public sphere.

公众舆论对民主理论和实践至关重要，但其广泛的多学科文献充斥着有争议的定义。一个主要的（激烈的）辩论是关于公共舆论在原则上是否应该包括个人的观点，如在民意调查中收集的，还是通过集体声明和行动表达的群体的观点。这个项目在现实中而不是在原则上考察公众舆论，利用社会心理学来预测，在特定的社会和政治条件下，个性化和基于群体的代表为特定的社会行动者服务于不同的目的。它为公民意见在民主政治中的作用这一长期存在的问题提供了新的答案。

Public opinion is crucial to democratic theory and practice, but its extensive multi-disciplinary literature is littered with contested definitions. One major (and heated) debate concerns whether public opinion should, in principle, comprise the views of individuals, as aggregated in polls, or of groups, as expressed through collective statements and action. This project examines public opinion in reality rather than in principle, using social psychology to predict that individuated and group-based representations serve distinct purposes for specific social actors under specific social and political conditions. It offers new answers to longstanding questions about the role of citizen opinion in democratic politics.