Dear Friends of the Citrin Center,
I want to update you on the remarkable first year of programming at the Jack Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research, and to tell you about the new series of events we have been implementing during the 2018-19 academic year.
As you know, the Citrin Center opened in the spring of 2017 as a legacy to Jack and his long service to Berkeley, including more than 45 years on the faculty and 10 years as the Director of the Institute of Governmental Studies. Housed originally within IGS, the Citrin Center now is located in the Charles and Louise Travers Political Science Department, Jack’s teaching home, with an affiliation to Social Science Matrix, a consortium of social science research units. The new office of the Citrin Center is 798 Barrows Hall.
The Citrin Center is devoted to improving the understanding of public opinion
through public events, polling, and research. Many of you gave generously to
establish an endowment of more than $600,000 for the Citrin Center; that
endowment has already grown by about 15 percent. The Center’s programming is
planned and managed by an Executive Committee comprised of me (Professor
Gabriel Lenz as Chair), Professor Laura Stoker, and Professor Amy Lerman.
The Center’s inaugural programming during the 2017-18 academic year focused on two major events. The Citrin Lecture was delivered in March by Professor Donald R. Kinder of the University of Michigan, one of the nation’s leading scholars on public opinion. Kinder is the author, most recently, of Neither Liberal nor Conservative: Ideological Innocence in the American Public. Then in May, the first Citrin Conference focused on “Trust and Populism in the Age of Trump,” providing an extraordinarily timely examination of the American political mood. At the conference, leading scholars from across the nation, including faculty members from Vanderbilt, the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois, and elsewhere presented their original research, and the event concluded with a roundtable discussion featuring Tom Mann from IGS and Brookings, Steven Hayward from IGS and the American Enterprise Institute, and David Brady from Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Both of these events drew exactly the kind of broad-based audience we hope to reach through the Center’s programming, including faculty, students, and members of the public.
In addition to hosting these events, the Center released the results of four surveys as part of the Berkeley IGS Poll, a major study of public opinion in California. The Poll issued 18 press releases outlining Californians’ attitudes on important issues such as the gubernatorial and Senate races, housing costs, public education, and gun control. The Poll also conducted targeted surveys in contested Congressional districts around the state, races that helped to determine control of the House of Representatives after the 2018 election. These surveys have been critical to helping improve public knowledge about political attitudes in the state, and also generating important data for future scholarly analysis.
In fall 2018, the Citrin Center conducted two panels on the mid-term elections. The first was titled “The 2018 Midterms: Blue Wave or Red Wall?, and the speakers— Laura Stoker of Berkeley Political Science, Eric McGhee of the Public Policy Institute of California, Samantha Luks of YouGov, and Mark DiCamillo of the IGS Survey— were remarkably prescient in predicting the election’s outcomes. The second event was an election post-mortem, focusing on Winners and Losers, featuring Robert van Houweling of Berkeley Political Science, Tom Mann of IGS and the Brookings Institution, and Bill Whalen of the Hoover Institution as speakers.
We are excited to be building on these many successful events in the coming year. On March 5, 2019, Peter Hart, the leading public opinion pollster in America over the last forty years, will deliver the Second Annual Citrin Lecture titled “The 2020 Election: The Challenges and Changes Facing Political Polling.” We are also planning a panel on Americans’ immigration attitudes in mid-March.
Then, on May 3, the Citrin Conference will focus on the timely topic of Gender and Politics with speakers who represent the foremost up- and- coming scholars doing work in this critical domain of public opinion. We are especially pleased that this conference will continue Jack’s long tradition of guidance and mentorship to the next generation of scholars. Also in this spirit, by the end of this year we will have initiated a series of small Research Grants to provide seed money for graduate student research.
Information about all past and upcoming events, including links to speakers’
presentations, will be available soon on our newly designed and relaunched website at citrincenter.berkeley.edu. The website summarizes the Center’s mission, lists its distinguished affiliated scholars, and includes a series of recent research reports.
Like the University of California as a whole, the Political Science Department and the Citrin Center face a landscape of declining financial support from the state. To an ever greater degree each year, the Center therefore must rely on private funding to support all the work we do at Berkeley and for the greater community. That is why we so deeply appreciate the outpouring of support that helped to endow the Citrin Center. We hope that you will continue to support the Center with your interest, participation and financial contributions in the coming years. You can find additional information about how to support the Center on our website.
The Citrin Center is off to a phenomenal start as both an important research center on public opinion and a major asset to the campus, as well as a legacy to Jack, who has been a friend, colleague and mentor to so many of us. We look forward to working in partnership with you and to keeping in touch as the Center continues to grow.
Sincerely,
Gabriel Lenz,
Chair, Citrin Center Executive Committee