AAPOR 80th Annual Conference
The AAPOR Annual Conference is the premier forum for the exchange of advances in public opinion and survey research.
Perched over a chasm, the Oracle of Delphi served as the ancient world’s source for divine wisdom and predictions about the future. Today, research insights from political polls and surveys are our modern-day public opinion oracles, providing valuable insights into people’s intentions, attitudes, and beliefs. Does our public trust the data we systematically divine? Can Pythia-the-AI bring us closer to Apollo?
The 2025 AAPOR Conference, “Reshaping Democracy’s Oracle,” will discuss the promises and perils that artificial intelligence (AI) and our information technology landscape have in changing political polling and survey research. Central to this theme is the role of new technologies in understanding voter behavior and an exploration of political polls given 2024 election outcomes around the world. Through short courses and the conference program, we will also examine the use of large language models, natural language processing, and machine learning algorithms to enhance and disrupt the ways we measure public opinion. Additionally, we will discuss ethical considerations, biases, and the importance of standards and transparency in an age of increasingly AI-driven insights and a potential “general purpose technology” (GPT) paradigm-shift.
For the conference, we encourage members and non-members to submit papers on a range of topics. We will have tracks on 2024 polling and elections as well as how AI is shaping surveys and public opinion research. (Some space will be saved for U.S. election-related papers that cannot make the regular submission deadline.) The 2025 conference is also the first since 2019 that the World Association for Public Opinion Research (WAPOR) will be located in the same city–and the same hotel–as AAPOR, so we encourage papers interested in measuring the opinions of non-US, multinational, multicultural, and multiregional publics.
Like the Oracle of Delphi, survey practitioners and pollsters find themselves balanced on a crevasse; on the cusp of an AI revolution and firmly in the age of hyperconnectivity, technology changes how we create, communicate, and make sense of our lives. So, too, will it change how we gather, analyze, and interpret public opinion data. As AI continues to advance at an unprecedented pace, it is poised to reshape how the public reacts to surveys and polls as well as how we understand public sentiment, forecast election outcomes, and inform policy decisions. At the 2025 AAPOR Conference, It’s imperative that we come together to discuss where AAPOR can lead and educate as well as how we can advocate for standards and data quality in this new age.
We look forward to seeing you in St. Louis!
Gina Walejko
Conference Chair
Morgan Earp
Associate Conference Chair
