PERSON: Emily Elkins

Cato Institute

Research Fellow and Director of Polling

Emily Ekins is a research fellow at the Cato Institute. Her research focuses primarily on American politics, public opinion, political psychology, and social movements, with an emphasis in survey and quantitative methods. She studies how values, experiences, and self-interest shape public opinion and attitudes toward government. Emily’s publications include “The Libertarian Roots of the Tea Party” and “Public Attitudes toward Federalism: The Public’s Preference for a Renewed Federalism.” Before joining Cato, she spent four years as the director of polling for Reason Foundation where she conducted national public opinion polls and published specialized research studies. In 2014 Emily authored an in-depth study of young Americans, “Millennials: The Politically Unclaimed Generation.” Prior to joining Reason, Emily worked as a research associate at Harvard Business School, where she coauthored several Harvard Business Case Studies and helped design and conduct research experiments and surveys.

She has discussed her research on Fox News and Fox Business, and her research has appeared in the Washington Post, Politico, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Times. Emily is an active member of the American Association of Public Opinion Research and the American Political Science Association.

She holds a PhD and M.A. in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her dissertation examined sources of support for the tea party movement and the moral values undergirding public demand for limited government.

— cato.org