8
Accountability through Public Opinion
least three heads of state (Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen, Omar al-Bashir in Sudan, and Nouri al-Maliki in Iraq) have announced that they will not seek reelection in response to popular protests. The deployment of conventional means of controlling power and domesticating disquiet such as state repression, media censorship, and divide-and-conquer tactics have been largely ineffectual against this rising tide of public sentiment. Plainly put, well-tucked prescripts about the stability of autocratic rule, the incompatibility of Islam and democracy, and the irrelevance of public opinion have been made into a hot mess. How will these events unfold? Will the fever for accountability and reform extend beyond North Africa and the Middle East? Will new, more democratic regimes replace the old, more autocratic ones? These pressing questions (and many, many others) will likely focus the attention of scholars and practitioners alike for quite some time. At the same time, lurking in their shadows is the perhaps deeper question: could any of this have been foreseen? The Danish physicist Niels Bohr is commonly attributed with once having said, “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” While this is certainly true at one level, this volume insists that a good deal can be said, concretely, about the importance of public opinion to the aims of good governance and about the conditions necessary for an activated public opinion to emerge. The proof of the relevance of this volume to understanding the transformation of the Arab world in progress, of course, ultimately rests on the content of its pages. Specifically and succinctly, then, the volume identifies individual-level (e.g., the battle for short-term attention, the discovery of shared values, the deployment of mobilizing narratives), institutional-level (e.g., constructing public spheres and strong civil society organizations), and mediating factors (e.g., communicative networks that enable the transmission of mobilizing frames and the cultivation of civic education) needed to build the capacity for activated public opinion. These building blocks facilitate movement onward and upward along what we term “the stairway to mobilization” from indifferent general publics to voting publics, attentive publics, active publics, and fully mobilized publics. And the mechanisms that move us up this stairway range from information sharing and attitude change to behavior change and the sustainable mobilization of mass publics. Ultimately, the events of the Arab Spring reinforce our firm conviction that good governance is beholden to communicative processes and institutional contexts that enable ordinary individuals to keep a watchful eye and, as the occasion warrants, to stand up, be counted, and demand the responsiveness of their governments.
The Present Volume The path to the present volume began in 2007. The World Bank’s Communication for Governance and Accountability Program (CommGAP) commissioned