Stimson

This fall, the world’s largest public opinion archive will honor the political scientist who was the first to quantify the country’s swings from conservatism to liberalism and back again.

The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research will present its 2016 Warren J. Mitofsky Award for Excellence in Public Opinion Research to James Stimson, professor of political science at the University of North Carolina. Stimson will accept the award, one of the highest in the field, Nov. 16 at a dinner in his honor in Washington, D.C.

The Mitofsky Award is one of the Roper Center’s many activities on the national stage. Affiliated with the Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research, the center has 22,000 public opinion datasets from more than 100 countries dating to 1935. Its iPOLL database of more than 650,000 survey questions gives users up-to-the-minute results from all major U.S. polls.

Stimson is well-known in the field of public opinion research for his signature “policy mood” index. The index was the first measurement of large-scale shifts in the public’s attitude toward domestic policy issues such as gun control and abortion. He has also analyzed how public mood has influenced elections and which public policies have been enacted.

“Jim allowed political scientists and social scientists to study the political system in a dynamic, longitudinal way that wasn’t possible previously,” said Peter Enns, executive director of the Roper Center and associate professor of government. “So when we talk about ‘the liberal ’60s’ or why [President Ronald] Reagan was elected in 1980 when the public seemed to be moving toward conservatism, he was the first to be able to quantify those trends.”

Similarly, Stimson’s analysis of “conflicted conservatives” was ahead of the curve, anticipating support for presidential candidate Donald Trump in his 2012 book, “Ideology in America” co-written with Christopher Ellis.

With software he developed in the 1980s, Stimson has analyzed every question from every national poll of Americans on their public policy preferences. That translates to thousands of polls on hundreds of questions posed by dozens of different firms and university researchers – all held by the Roper Center.

“That is a staggering amount of data,” Stimson said. “Other archives specialize in academic research data, but only Roper houses the results of thousands of commercial surveys, the result of which would be lost without the Roper’s careful efforts to clean and store them.”

Whereas most Roper users analyze a study or two on a single issue, Stimson uses every poll on every domestic policy issue. “A former director of Roper once characterized me as an ‘industrial-strength user,’” he quipped.

Stimson is also known for making his software and data publically available, allowing scholars to use it for their research. And many graduate students have benefited from Stimson’s guidance as an adviser – including Enns.

“Jim believes in, respects and models the best practices in conducting research,” Enns said.