April 11, 2024 6:00pm-8:00pm

Speaker:  Michael A. Bailey

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.