Mark Baldassare
President and CEO
Public Policy Institute of California
Mark Baldassare is president and CEO of the Public Policy Institute of California, where he also holds the Arjay and Frances Fearing Miller Chair in Public Policy and directs the PPIC Statewide Survey-a large-scale public opinion project designed to develop an in-depth profile of the social, economic, and political forces at work in California elections and in shaping the state's public policies. Prior to assuming his current position, he was PPIC's director of research. He is the author of ten books, including The Coming Age of Direct Democracy: California's Recall and Beyond.
Before joining PPIC, he was a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of California, Irvine, where he held the Johnson Chair in Civic Governance and initiated and directed the Orange County Annual Survey. He has conducted surveys for the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the California Business Roundtable. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the School of Policy, Planning, and Development at the University of Southern California, the California Volunteers Commission, and the Advisory Board of the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley.