Polls, Pollsters, and Public Opinion

Clifford Young is President of Ipsos Public Affairs in the United States and an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins SAIS. He is an expert on consumer and public opinion trends, corporate reputation, elections and scenario construction. He also oversees Ipsos' media partnerships, including ABC News, Axios, NPR, Thomson Reuters, USA Today, the Washington Post, among others. Kathryn Ziemer is a Clinical Psychologist and Clinical Director at Old Town Psychology. She founded Old Town Psychology in 2018 and has built it into an award-winning mental health clinic that combines research and clinical work. She is an expert on attitude formation, emotion development, cognitive biases, and behavior change. She previously worked as a Research Scientist at Ipsos Public Affairs.

• 1. The Three-Hatted Pollster; Part I Fundamentals of Public Opinion: 2. What is Public Opinion?; 3. Attitude Formation at the Individual Level; 4. When Public Opinion is Stable and When it is Not; Part II. The Pollster as Data Scientist: 5. Understanding Bias and Error; 6. Assessing a Single Poll in the 2016 US Presidential Election; 7. The Case of Grexit and Assessing the Polls in Aggregate; Part III. The Pollster as Fortune Teller: 8. Cognitive Biases in Prediction; 9. Triangulated Election Prediction; 10. Public Opinion as a Decision Input for Other Outcomes; Part IV. The Pollster as Spin Doctor: 11. Engaging Public Opinion: Theory and Practice; 12. Communicating in the 2022 Brazilian Presidential Election; 13. The Pollster in Society.