Babich N. S. The Ontological Assumptions of Public Opinion Polls in Socio-Political and Technological Context. Sociology of Science and Technology. 2019, Vol. 10, Issue 4, pp. 113-124.

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Abstract

The article analyzes the reasons for the low degree of problematization of ontological assumptions in public opinion research. The development of sociology is characterized with constant discussions about the relationship between individual and society. At the same time, in fact, atomic individualism remains the only ontology underlying public opinion polls. The author proposes a hypothesis that this situation is coherently influenced by two factors — technological and socio-political. Their concerted and unidirectional impact could lead to the absolute dominance of the image of the ontological ground of public opinion as a set of atomized individuals. Among the technological factors, the author mentions the localization of research objects in space and time, the consideration of individuals as isolated units of observation and the mediated access to respondents through usage of formalized tools that leads to the analytical unification of public opinion bearers. All these features of the mass surveyare explained by the saving of resources and the simplification of the data collection system, that is, they are purely technical. But at the conceptual level, they lead to the fact that the carriers of public opinion are considered as identical, isolated, relatively stable and indivisible units. Factors of the social role are manifested through linking the practice of polls to the election procedure. In its framework, individuals are also considered as the identical (one person — one vote), isolated (each vote himself,anonymously), indivisible (one can’t divide the vote), stable (one can’t change the choice after the vote) units. Thus, the influence of two factors coincides in all considered aspects.