Michael G. Hagen is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Institute for Public Affairs at Temple University. Hagen is a leading scholar in the areas of electoral politics and public opinion, and an expert in the field of survey research. He arrived at Temple in the fall of 2004, after two years as Associate Research Professor and Director of the Center for Public Interest Polling at the Eagleton Institute of Politics, Rutgers University, in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Hagen's current research focuses on the conduct and consequences of campaigns and elections in the United States. From 1998 through 2002, Hagen was Senior Research Fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, and Co-Director of the 2000 National Annenberg Election Survey, the largest academic election poll ever conducted, involving more than 100,000 interviews. On the basis of that survey, along with extensive data on television advertising and news coverage, Hagen co-wrote (with Richard Johnston and Kathleen Hall Jamieson) The 2000 Presidential Election and the Foundations of Party Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2004). In general, the book describes and explains how campaigns allocate their resources, and it assesses the extent to which campaigns succeed in influencing voters and the outcomes of elections. In particular, the book argues that the 2000 outcome was close because the campaign made it so, thanks to well-conceived strategic initiatives first by the Bush campaign and then by the Gore campaign.

Hagen has written previously about the process by which the major political parties decide their presidential nominees, the initiative and referendum as methods for making public policy, and the racial attitudes of white Americans and their influence on support for policies designed to address inequalities. He is co-author (with Paul M. Sniderman) of Race and Inequality: A Study in American Values, and a contributor to Reasoning and Choice: Explorations in Political Psychology, winner of the American Political Science Association’s Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award for 1991. He has contributed chapters to several other books on American elections and published articles in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the British Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, Political Behavior, and Public Opinion Quarterly.

From 1990 through 1998 Hagen was on the faculty of the Department of Government at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he also served for two years as Director of Undergraduate Studies. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and his B.A. in Political Science from Stanford University. Hagen grew up in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.