The Center for Communication & Public Policy (CCPP) is proud to celebrate the outstanding work of our graduate affiliates presenting at the 50th Annual Meeting of the Midwest Association for Public Opinion Research (MAPOR), held November 21–22 in Chicago. This year’s conference theme — “Fifty Years of Measuring Change: Where we were, where we are,
CCPP Faculty Affiliate Olga Kamenchuk, Associate Professor of Research Methodology and International Communication at Northwestern University, was recently interviewed (see below) by prominent Russian journalist, dissident, and opposition commentator Stanislav Kucher on his widely viewed YouTube program. Kucher is known for his outspoken criticism of the Kremlin, his incisive interviews, and his long-form political analysis,
CCPP Director Erik Nisbet Interviewed by BBC on California Redistricting Vote and Its National Implications November 5, 2025 CCPP Director and Owen L. Coon Professor of Policy Analysis and Communication Erik C. Nisbet was interviewed by the BBC for their coverage of California voters’ recent approval of a ballot measure allowing mid-decade redistricting. This move
As debates over political maps intensify ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, CCPP Director and Owen L. Coon Professor of Policy Analysis and Communication Erik C. Nisbet was featured and quoted in a recent Los Angeles Times article examining the growing trend of mid-decade redistricting efforts in both Republican- and Democratic-led states. In the article,
In a February 2025 televised interview with CBS Evening News, CCPP Director Erik C. Nisbet, Owen L. Coon Professor of Policy Analysis and Communication at Northwestern University, analyzed a familiar Republican communication strategy: framing opposition to federal programs around claims of fraud, waste, and abuse. At the time, Nisbet explained how the heavy repetition of
A recent WGN Investigates segment, “It’s Not Just National Political Figures Facing Fury — Local Leaders Also Under Threat,” featured insights from Erik Nisbet, Director of CCPP and Owen L. Coon Professor of Policy Analysis & Communication at Northwestern University. The news segment examines the growing number of threats, intimidation, and harassment targeting local officials
Congratulations to CCPP faculty affiliate Dr. Ayşe D. Lokmanoğlu, whose new co-authored article, “Topic Modeling of Video and Image Data: A Visual Semantic Unsupervised Approach,” has just been published in Communication Methods and Measures. The paper introduces VisTopics, an innovative computational framework for analyzing large-scale visual datasets by combining AI-powered image captioning, unsupervised clustering, and
On May 22, 2025, the Center for Communication & Public Policy and Northwestern University’s Buffett Institute for Global Affairs hosted a campus conversation with esteemed historian and academic Nicholas J. Cull from the University of Southern California to explore his concept of “reputational security”—the idea that a nation’s safety and security are strengthened by its
Last week, Erik C. Nisbet, Owen L. Coon Professor of Policy Analysis & Communication and Director of the Center for Communication & Public Policy, presented his research “Pandemic Legacy: How the COVID Online Ecosystem of 2020–2021 Shaped Enduring Distrust in Public Health” at the Symposium on Science & Politics, hosted by the Center for Science
The International Journal of Public Opinion Research has released a special issue titled “Global Perspectives on Science, Polarization, and Populism,” co-edited by CCPP Director Erik C. Nisbet (Northwestern University) and Aysenur Dal (Bilkent University). The special issue brings together scholars from across the world to examine how political polarization and populism shape public opinion about
