Description
Polling is in flux — if not crisis — due to embarrassing polling failures and widespread abandonment of the random sampling techniques that built the field. We need strong theory linked to practical considerations to fortify the field so that it can handle current and future challenges. The polling community is overwhelmingly focused on weighting and other techniques that address only one source of non-response bias. To make matters worse, the kind of bias addressed by current practice may be less relevant in polling as practiced today. Bailey re-assess contemporary polling with an emphasis on so-called non-ignorable nonresponse. The book offers practical and effective ways to address all kinds of non-response – often leading to new insights, including seeing how conventional polling methods vastly overstate partisan polarization.
Event Information
Location: Princeton University, Corwin Hall Room #127
When: Thursday, April 11, 2024
6:00 PM – 8:00 PM
$20 for PANJAAPOR members
$30 for non-members
Free for students
Link for registration coming soon
About the Author
Michael A. Bailey is the Colonel William J. Walsh Professor of American Government in the Department of Government and McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University, where he directs the Data Science for Public Policy program. He is the author of Polling at a Crossroads: Rethinking Modern Survey Research from Cambridge University Press (2024). The book argues that the polling field needs to do more than re-weight data to deal with challenges of contemporary survey environment.
Bailey has published articles in top political science journals on the Supreme Court, elections and policy. He has written two statistics textbooks, Real Stats and Real Econometrics, both from Oxford University Press. The books focus on endogeneity (“correlation is not causation”) and quickly start using real data sets to answer important questions. Bailey is also co-author with Forrest Maltzman of The Constrained Court: Law, Politics and the Decisions Justices Make from Princeton University Press.
Bailey received his B.A. in Government and Japanese from the University of Notre Dame and his Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University. He has been a visiting faculty member at Oxford University, the University of Tokyo and Sciences Po – Paris.
If interested in purchasing the author’s book: https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/social-science-research-methods/quantitative-methods/polling-crossroads-rethinking-modern-survey-research?format=PB