The Nisga'a Treaty: Polling Dynamics and Political Communication in Comparative Context (review)

Relations between Aboriginals and the greater society continue to be most delicate. J. Rick Ponting provides a well documented and analytical comparative piece, detailing the processing of public opinion of the Nisga'a Treaty in British Columbia and the official reconciliation process by political powers in Australia. More broadly, this work speaks to the intersection between public opinion polling and issues related to democratic politics and leadership. Specifically, it poses some key questions: how should government use public opinion polling and should it be responsive to it or lead and shape it?

The main case study is the Nisga'a Treaty. The focus is on the polling and advertising events from the summer and fall of 1998, during which the Nisga'a Treaty was signed, ratified by the Nisga'a people, and the provincial legislature was recalled to deal with the Nisga'a Final Agreement Act (Bill 51). The political ethnography documents the extensive public opinion polling and advertising campaign, with a thorough look at the manner in which this was handled within government circles. The second case study serves as a complement to the Nisga'a Treaty study, examining events in Australia in late 1999 and early 2000 in preparation for the final report of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation.

In the case of British Columbia, for Premier Glen Clark and the New Democratic Party, Nisga'a was the number one issue. Selling the treaty was a high priority as the government sought to use it to regain its waning popularity in the province. Clark played a leadership role in the process and used significant human and financial resources to ensure its success, assigning some of his top people to the project, including his own Deputy Minister, polling experts, and advertising specialists. About $7.6 million was spent on the implementation effort, which included polling, advertising, and public information campaigning to gauge public opinion and sell the treaty to the public. The stakes were high as the treaty faced strong opposition from high-profile individuals in the public, media, and political sphere.

In Australia, the political environment was quite different: Indigenous issues were not a top priority, and relations between the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation and the federal government were strained. Prime Minister John Howard was opposed to a fundamental part of the reconciliation process, namely, a government apology to the Indigenous people of Australia. He played much less of a leadership role in reconciliation than did Clark in British Columbia. The unified New Democratic Party government, in contrast to the less cohesive relations in the Australian Commonwealth government, yielded a variety of different outcomes; however, the generation and processing of public opinion data by each government was quite similar in many ways, governed by socio-political factors at every step.

Methodologically, Ponting's work is a political ethnography drawing on numerous sources to provide a fair account of the events that transpired, including interviews with politicians, bureaucrats, key non-government players, as well as documents from public sources including web sites and those accessed through the Freedom of Information Act. This comparative historical work has roots in symbolic interactionist theory and social constructionist theory, particularly Hubert Blumer's constructivist approach to examining public opinion. It proposes to understand public opinion by working backwards, with the starting point being the political elite who act on public opinion, and critically tracing and scrutinizing the different lines and expressions of public opinion which come to their attention. Using the two case studies, it is shown that public opinion data are far from objective indicators that register with decision makers; in fact, the registering of public opinion with government officials is best characterized as a social process, with many dimensions (e.g., social, economic, political, trust, norms of professionalism, self-interest). He demonstrates to the reader the social processes involved in every stage of the production and generation of the polls, as well as the advertising...