Mark Baldassare, PhD

Biography

Mark Baldassare is a Nonresident Senior Scholar in the Leonard D. Schaeffer Institute for Public Policy and Government Service at USC. He is a Nonresident Scholar in the California Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is statewide survey director and the Miller Chair in public policy at the Public Policy Institute of California. From 2007 to 2022, he also served as president and CEO of PPIC. Prior to that, he served as PPIC’s director of research and senior fellow. He is a leading expert on public opinion and survey methodology, and has directed the PPIC Statewide Survey since its founding in 1998. He is an authority on elections, voter behavior, and political and fiscal reform, authoring ten books, including, The Coming Age of Direct Democracy: California’s Recall and Beyond, A California State of Mind: The Conflicted Voter in a Changing World, and When Government Fails: The Orange County Bankruptcy and numerous articles and reports on these topics. He often provides testimony before legislative committees and state commissions. Before joining PPIC, he was a professor of urban and regional planning in the School of Social Ecology at the University of California, Irvine, where he held the Johnson Chair in Civic Governance. He has conducted surveys for the Los Angeles Times, the Orange County Register, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the California Business Roundtable. He holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California at Berkeley.