Historical example '', by
Jacques-Louis David (1787). From 431 B.C.E to 404 B.C.E., ancient Greece was torn apart by the
Peloponnesian War between
Athens and
Sparta. The war concluded with an Athenian defeat and several years of oppression by pro-Spartan rulers. By 399 B.C.E, Athens had returned to self-rule through revolution. At this time, Athens was undergoing social turmoil due to the apparent failure of democracy as an effective form of government, which created a public backlash against anything anti-democratic. Socrates—the self-described "gadfly" of Athens because of his practice of
elenchos (critical interrogation)—was seen by many as anti-democratic and thus a traitor to Athens due to his associations with Critias and Alcibiades (the former a Spartan supported tyrant, the latter a deserter to Sparta) and his frequent praises of the Spartan and Creten governments because of their similarity to many of his philosophical opinions on government. The prevailing political climate of distrusting anything remotely anti-Athens or anti-democracy coupled with attacks from Socrates's personal enemies led to the philosopher's execution by poison in 399 B.C.E.
Public opinion The phrase originates from the French term
opinion publique, which was first attributed to
Montaigne, the father of modern
Skepticism and a major figure of the
French Renaissance, around 1588 C.E. It is generally used to describe the overall opinion of the public body about a certain issue. The phrase is commonly used interchangeably with political climate but the two actually refer to separate concepts.
Public opinion is the aggregate logical thoughts that the public thinks and expresses about an issue (which does not have to be political in nature), while political climate is what the public's emotional reaction to those logical thoughts are. Depending on the nature of the thoughts (if they are considered controversial or extreme), the emotional reaction can range from nothing to a highly violent state. Accordingly, controversial issues in the public eye are usually accompanied by or can even produce a polarizing political climate. For example, the introduction, passing, and court fight over
Proposition 8 in
California brought a controversial issue into the public sphere, which resulted in such a drastic change in the political climate of the
United States as to produce many protests throughout the nation, some of them violent.
Opinion polls An
opinion poll is a survey of public opinion from a particular group of people or sample. For determining the political climate, this usually would be a
cross-section of the population in question. Opinion polls conduct series of questions and then extrapolate the average opinion of the sample according to their answers. However, opinion polls generally have appreciative margins of error because of the inability to survey the entire population and the improbability of surveying a perfectly random cross-section of the population. For example, the
Wall Street Journal estimated in 2006 that the average margin of error is about 3-5% in opinion polls because of a wide variety of potential inaccuracies such as
response bias and
selection bias. Opinion polls are also known to be entirely incorrect when predicting the outcome of certain events. The best-known example of this is the
1948 US presidential election, in which the prediction was that
Thomas Dewey would easily defeat
Harry Truman. Major polling organizations, including
Gallup and
Roper, indicated a landslide victory for Dewey when, in fact, Truman was the victor in a close election and kept the presidency. 2016 saw the validity of opinion polls enter the debate once more, as polls in both the UK "
Brexit" referendum and the
US presidential election were ultimately shown to be largely incorrect. Polls widely predicted a win for
Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, while instead
Republican candidate Donald J. Trump won the
Electoral College and, therefore, the presidency. ==See also==