Drawing on ideas from political science, sociology and psychology this text explores how three sets of political participants - legislative staffers, political activists and journalists - actually evaluate and assess public opinion. The text gives one approach to understanding how public opinion fits into the empirical world of politics and finds that it has little to do with the mass public. Concluding that many political actors reject the "voice of the people" as uninformed and nebulous, relying instead on interest groups and the media for representations of public opinion.