Election Polling and Democratic Consolidation in East Asia
Matrix is located on the 8th floor of Barrows Hall, on the UC Berkeley campus, near Telegraph and Bancroft Avenues, just up the hill from Sather Gate. There are entrances at both ends of the building, but only one of the elevators on the eastern side goes directly to the 8th floor. You can alternatively take the stairs to the 7th floor and walk up the stairs.
Polling is an exploding industry and increasingly a prominent institutional player in electoral politics in East Asia. It has been utilized to select party nominees for elected office, and as a tool for decision-making usually reserved for political parties.
What is the roll of polling? Is it a scientific instrument that gauges the political opinions and intentions of the public, or rather a means to re-engineer the voting public's opinions and intentions and thus thwart the aims of democratic consolidation?
This conference, organized by the Institute of East Asian Studies, brings together leading scholars of electoral politics and democratization, as well as a few leading practitioners of election polling from Taiwan and Korea and their counterparts from across the Bay Area and the United States.