Giorgio Agamben: Political elections or opinion polls?

The fact that what we continue to call democracy has lost its meaning is demonstrated by the indiscriminate use of opinion polls, which lay bare the already obvious fact that elections are merely a survey of public opinion rather than an expression of political will. Opinion polls, by showing day by day—through fluctuations in respondents’ views—the numerical standing of the parties, carry out a sort of continuous election, which nobody controls and which can therefore, as indeed happens, be manipulated to in turn influence the very opinion it is supposed to reflect. We call democracy a government of public opinion; that is to say, of something politically entirely insubstantial, which has no reality other than the polls, which, at the very moment they appear to record it, create, alter and manipulate it incessantly. The process by which Rousseau’s volonté générale [general will]—which cannot be quantified—has gradually been transformed into public opinion, which is merely a matter of numbers, defines the fate of Western democracies.