| This dissertation examines the content and nature of public opinion in Britain during a ten-year period of international crisis and war. It demonstrates that public opinion, as a phenomenon, underwent a radical transformation during that period, consisting in a massive increase in the number of people who commonly interested themselves in public affairs, a consequent expansion of the public sphere, and a change in the dominant model, or schema, of public opinion. It demonstrates also that, contrary to the view of most historians, significant change in Britain's political culture began well before World War Two.;In 1935, the effective individual expression of opinion on most policy issues was still limited primarily to members of the educated middle class. Under this "Bagehot/Bryce model" the role of the working classes was limited to symbolic affirmation of the governing system, and occasional collective intrusion into the public sphere. A series of international crises during the late 1930s, however, including the Hoare-Laval Pact and the Munich crisis, made politics more salient for everyone, and the war itself both accelerated that process, and made the government of Great Britain more disposed, for morale reasons, to listen to the opinions of ordinary people. The transformation of opinion was aided by technological and societal changes, including universal elementary education; universal adult suffrage; the rise of new mass media, that is radio and cinema, which increased access to political information and provided alternative models of reality; and by the importation from America of quantitative opinion surveys.;By 1945, the majority of people of all classes in Britain had become able to form and express opinion on matters of public policy. One result of this change was the replacement of the restrictive Bagehot/Bryce model of how public opinion should work by the more open and inclusive "naive-democratic model." Another result was the generation, through interaction between citizens and policymakers, of the demand for postwar reform which would lead to Labour's victory in the 1945 election and the creation of Europe's first large welfare state. |
