Abstract:

The article aims at showing that public opinion, if not 'lawful', at least shows certain regularities that can be utilized in predicting shifts in opinion change. The argument is based on a French nation wide survey replicated five times since 1977 and covering a wide range of different opinions, the results of which were analyzed using classical factor analytic techniques. The results indicate that public opinion in any given year could be described in terms of four principle dimensions. After describing these dimensions and examining their stability over time, we suggest that changes in public opinion tend show a pendulum movement along each dimension and that awareness of this should enable us to predict future opinion shifts.