Dear Friends of the Citrin Center,
We begin by expressing our hope that you and your families are keeping well through this period of twin national crises. The onset of the pandemic in March forced closure of the Berkeley campus and the cancellation of the annual Award Lecture by Professor Diana Mutz of the University of Pennsylvania and the Conference on “Is Misinformation a Threat to American Democracy?” It is our hope that these events will take place in person on campus in the spring.
Programing
Before the campus closed, the Citrin Center had hosted four highly successful events, all of which can be revisited as videos along with the panelists’ slides on
citrincenter.berkeley.edu/events. To review, these were:
- “Will it still be the Economy Stupid in 2020?”
- “The Democratic Race at the End of the Invisible Primary”
- “The California Primary and Super Tuesday”
- “Immigration and the America Ethos.
Last fall, we awarded four students substantial grants to pursue public opinion research projects. The students and their projects are as follows:
- Matt Brundage: Survey Experiments on Income Inequality and Relative Deprivation
- Sean Freeder: The Role of Political Correctness in Elite Communication
- Elizabeth Mitchell: All the Wrong Reasons: The Role of Justifications in Political Behavior
- Rhea Myerscough: Does Public Opinion on Payday Lending Vary by Racial Group
A new set of awards will be made this fall.
Fall 2020
This fall we have scheduled four significant events. Each is a webinar and you will be receiving regular notifications about the participants, schedules, registration and access. The panels are:
- “Race and Public Opinion: Today in Historical Perspective”
- “The Last Ten Days: Countdown to the 2020 Vote”
- Post-Mortem: Why It Happened and the Implications for American Democracy”
In addition, the Award Lecture will be delivered by Robert Putnam. He is the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, the author of Bowling Alone and other seminal books.
Administration
The Citrin Center is administered by a Faculty Executive Committee. Its members are:
Congratulations to Professor Lerman whose recent book Good Enough for Government Work: The Public Reputation Crisis in America (And What We Can Do To Fix It (University of Chicago Press) won the prestigious Gladys Kammerer and Woodrow Wilson Foundation Best Book Awards from the American Political Science Association (APSA).
Congratulations also to Professors Mo and Broockman who jointly were awarded the Emerging Scholar Award from APSA’s Public Opinion and Voting Behavior Section. This award is given to “the top scholar in the field who is within ten years of his or her dissertation.”
There also is an External Advisory Committee that consults with the Executive Committee and reviews the status of the Center and its endowment. The members are:
