December 23, 2011

Marquette Law School gets into the political polling business...

... with Charles Franklin, who is a University of Wisconsin political science professor.
"There are a host of things we'll be able to look at from time to time to paint a much deeper and broader picture of how people feel about the direction the state is headed in, both good and bad," says Franklin.

"It's not a state of one mind," he adds of Wisconsin, a perennial swing state in elections. "It's also not a state of two minds. There are a lot more mixed feelings in both parties."
"It's not a state of one mind... It's also not a state of two minds..." It's a state that has lost its mind.
Many have questioned why a law school is getting into the polling business, Franklin says. But he notes Marquette Law School has already become a "public policy crossroads" by hosting political debates and issue forums. The polling project is an extension of that, he says.

Franklin says Wisconsin is poorly served by the limited polling currently done. Most media organizations are no longer willing or can't afford to conduct polls. And the few polls done by partisan organizations are quickly dismissed by critics as biased, even when they are solid.
Should a law school be in the polling business? If so, and if the polling expert is a UW prof, why is that law school Marquette and not Wisconsin?  Questions, questions. Some of which can be answered through polling. Anyway, I'm excited by the prospect of getting uniquely high quality polls about our uniquely weirdly political state, Wisconsin.

6 comments:

Charlie said...

Of course a law school should be in the polling business. How else could we know what laws mean, or where the living constitution has moved itself to?

edutcher said...

You'll know they've gone over the edge when Rom Paul is named flavor of the week.

Steve Austin said...

Was Charles Franklin the guy who it came out was the big dem liberal about a year or two ago? I.e. he always tried to play this middle of the road wise man, but got caught up in some Walker derangement?

In regards to MU Law, those guys got some serious private money in recent years and are spending it to create essentially a think tank. Their influence will grow while Madison continues to decline by always alligning themselves with the lefty protest culture. Loophole Louie for UW law dean!

Mark O said...

There should also be an option for auto shop. What's the tuition at this fine school?

wildswan said...

My thesis is that everything that's going to happen in the US politically, maybe also with jobs and education, is happening now in Wisconsin. We had Occupy before Occupy had a name; we had drum circles; we had public sector union collective bargaining reform and public union pushback; we had a reforming Republican Governor - Walker For President 2016 -; we had public pension reform; we had high court craziness; we have city v. suburban/rural. So we SHOULD have special polling that gets at why this is happening here - and what's coming next.

DADvocate said...

Given the strong liberal tilt of academia, I question whether polling done by a university will be considered non-partisan by many.

Working at a marketing research firm, I'm curious how this project will go. It can be a fairly complex process if you go into much depth analytically. I program surveys and have written a thousand lines of code or more just to do real time statistical computations during the survey.