Everett Ladd Jr.; Roper Polling Expert

Everett Carll Ladd Jr., a social scientist who for years directed the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, died Wednesday at a Connecticut hospital after a brief illness.

The 62-year-old polling expert had led the Roper Center for the past two decades and was chiefly responsible for its rise as the world’s richest archive of public opinion research.

The center now collects poll results from more than 14,000 surveys and under Ladd’s leadership launched the first online archive of polls conducted in the United States and abroad.

Ladd emphasized the importance of preserving poll research “so that for generations to come, social science would have the benefit of studying the public’s voice--something so valued in a democracy,” said Lois Timms-Ferrara, associate director of the Roper Center, which is based at the University of Connecticut.

She called Ladd a philosopher in the world of public opinion and policy who always sought to make “the public voice” better understood.

That objective informs his book, “The Ladd Report,” published earlier this year. Analyzing an amalgam of research on American society, he directly challenged the provocative thesis of Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam that Americans were disengaging from civic life or, to use the metaphor he coined, “bowling alone.”

Putnam had cited declining membership in such groups as the Elks, the PTA and the League of Women Voters as evidence that America’s civic impulse was waning. He made this argument in a 1995 essay in the Journal of Democracy titled “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital.” Putnam’s theory was hugely influential, becoming, as one writer observed, “the social science equivalent of the theory of relativity.”

While acknowledging that the ranks of some institutions were thinning, Ladd argued that Putnam had missed something important: an explosion of newer types of groups that appealed more strongly to contemporary tastes.

“The Elks and the Boy Scouts are less prominent and active now than they were half a century ago,” Ladd wrote, “but the Sierra Club is much more so. Bowling leagues are down, but U.S. youth soccer has emerged de novo and engages more than 2 million boys and girls, together with an army of adult volunteers.”

Joining, he concluded, “has in fact become more widespread, not less so.”

The influential pollster wrote or edited more than 20 books, including “The American Polity,” a textbook now in its sixth edition. He joined the University of Connecticut in 1964 as a professor of political science and edited Public Opinion magazine for a decade. He recently retired as head of the Roper Center, founded in 1946 by Elmo Roper.

Ladd could be a harsh critic of his field. He alienated many of his colleagues when he impugned the accuracy of the 1996 presidential campaign polls in a Wall Street Journal article headlined “The Pollsters’ Waterloo.”

He alleged that polls overestimated President Clinton’s strength, citing in particular a CBS News-New York Times poll that projected an 18-point victory margin for Clinton over Bob Dole.

He compared the 1996 polls to the performance of pollsters in 1948, when surveys projected a huge loss by Harry Truman to Thomas Dewey.

Clinton was victorious, but not by the huge margin Ladd said many polls had predicted. He argued that the faulty predictions held far too much sway in the public mind, resulting in “terribly low” voter turnout of under 50%, the lowest for a presidential election since 1924.

“Surely more than one factor affected turnout,” he wrote. “But it is likely that pollsters and reporters dampened voters’ interest, hence participation, by announcing that the presidential contest was really no contest at all.”

After vociferous protests and rebuttals from commercial pollsters, who help support the Roper Center, Ladd expressed regrets about his comments concerning the polls’ accuracy. But he continued to lament the proliferation of “horse race” polls, counting 300 separate national polls in the last two months of the 1996 election season, compared to only 10 in 1968.

He feared that too many polls caused distortions in the public mind.

“The only important question for an electorate is not who is likely to win,” he said, “but who should win. And I think the proliferation of polls pushes conceptualization of the contest at least a bit further in the direction of who will win.”