WAPOR 72nd Annual Conference
19-22 May 2019 ● Toronto, Canada

Online program (some with uploaded presentations)

OR
Paper Version of the Program (with At-A-Glance) begins on p. 167

The World Association for Public Opinion Research (WAPOR) held its 72nd Annual Conference 19-21 May 2019 in Toronto, Canada. The WAPOR conference convened immediately after and overlapped with the last day of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) conference. The conference topics related to public opinion broadly, especially those related to the conference theme.

Conference Theme: Public Opinion and Democracy

It has been over 800 years since the Magna Carta, and international survey research shows that liberal democratic values of respect for the will of the people, human rights, impartial justice and the rule of law have become widely adopted by citizens across the world. Given how central democratic principles are to the field of survey research, and how central a role public opinion polling plays in the practice of democracy, it is clearly time for social researchers to examine the relationship between public opinion and democracy in some detail.

Do we witness a decline in political and institutional trust and in the perceived legitimacy of democracy? Does the polling profession need to renew its own levels of trust and legitimacy with the public? How should public opinion research operate in order to better serve society and democracy? What is the role of stakeholder/expert research? How do the answers to these questions vary between established and emerging democracies?

There were four conference formats including: panels, round-table sessions, and research papers as oral or poster formats. The round tables will be presented in the new “Innovation Room” at our Toronto Conference. You can find the first round table podcast below, with more to follow.

Topics included:

  • Public opinion and democracy
  • New sources of information on public opinion and the use of social media to voice public opinion
  • News, media, journalism and public opinion
  • Political behavior, participation and culture
  • Electoral polls in emerging/incomplete democracies
  • Methodological challenges and improvements, including in the areas of sampling, measurement, survey design and survey response or non-response
  • Challenges of comparative research and International Survey Projects, cross-cultural concerns in data collection and measurement issues
  • Social media, big data, sentiment analysis, and emerging technologies
  • Best practice in stakeholder research and expert surveys

Round Table Podcasts


DAY ONE: Sunday May 19th
11:05am – 12:35pm WINDSOR ROOM
Round Table I
Democracy and Democratic Values: Dynamics, Measurement, Forecast (# 2352)
Convenor: Christian Haerpfer

Goal: This roundtable unites leading scholars in the field of values research to examine the implication of social value change for the quality and consolidation of democracies worldwide. Participants will address such issues as the ongoing debate on democracy decline and the rise of populism, elite-mass linkages, public opinion and political participation, causal relationship between value change and democratic consolidation and threat to democratic rule, relationship between change in social values and future of regional and global integration, etc. 

Invited Contributors/Discussants: Ronald Inglehart, Pippa Norris, Leonardo Morlino, Robert Worcester, Christian Welzel, Alejandro Moreno, Christian Haerpfer, Marita Carballo, Juan Diez-Nicolas, Hennie Kotze, Henrique de Castro, Marta Lagos, Ian McAllister and others.