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, and where we’re going” — is especially fitting given the innovative contributions our students are making across survey methodology, political communication, and computational social science.
These presentations exemplify the breadth and depth of graduate research at the CCPP — from AI and public opinion to risk communication, political behavior, and digital extremism. We are proud to see our students contributing to MAPOR’s 50th year of advancing rigorous public opinion research.
Congratulations to Yanling, Mandi, Hoda, Marcelina, and Fatima on representing Northwestern and the CCPP at MAPOR 2025!
Below is the list of CCPP Graduate presentations at MAPOR and or see the full MAPOR conference program.
Yanling Zhao & Mandi Cai
Presentation: The Chat Heard ‘Round the World: How ChatGPT Impacted Media Framing, Public Engagement, and Public Opinion with Artificial Intelligence
Session: Intersection of Media, News, and Public Opinion
*Friday, 1:30–3:00 PM (DePaul)
Co-authors: Ayse Lokmanoglu, Erik Nisbet
Yanling and Mandi jointly present findings from CCPP’s large-scale, multimethod project analyzing how the launch of ChatGPT reshaped AI news framing, public engagement, and global opinion. Their study offers one of the earliest comprehensive empirical examinations of the “AI inflection point” in contemporary media systems.
Hoda Fakhari
Poster: Measuring Public Opinion About the Complexity of Health and Environmental Risks: A Pilot Test of a Perceived Risk Complexity Scale
Poster Session: Friday, 5:10 PM (Atrium South)
Co-author: Erik Nisbet
Hoda presents new experimental and psychometric work from her dissertation, introducing a novel scale to assess how individuals perceive the complexity of public health and environmental risks — a key contribution to risk communication theory and measurement.
Marcelina A. Przespolewska
Talk: Assessing the Potential of LLMs Conditioned on Media Diets to Predict Electoral Outcomes: A Case Study of the 2022 U.S. Gubernatorial Elections
Session: Prompting New Research: Large Language Models and AI
Saturday, 8:30–10:00 AM (River North CD)
Marcelina introduces a cutting-edge approach using large language models conditioned on media consumption patterns to simulate political behavior and evaluate their predictive potential for election outcomes.
Fatima Gaw
Talk: Platforming Transgressive Publics: The Political Illiberalism of Alt-Tech Social Media Users
Session: Social Media and Influence
Saturday, 10:15–11:45 AM (River North CD)
Co-author: Erik C. Nisbet
Fatima presents new findings from her dissertation examining the illiberal attitudes, identity performance, and political worldviews of users on alt-tech platforms — a timely and policy-relevant investigation into digital publics operating outside mainstream content moderation systems.