“There are smart pollsters, insightful pollsters, accurate pollsters … but few are all three. Christine Quirk is. She makes people who hire her look smarter than we really are.”—
Christy Quirk is a more cosmopolitan globalist than most. I met her in Istanbul about twenty years ago, where I discovered she had an interesting job: She’s a public opinion research consultant who specializes in emerging and declining democracies, which means she conducts opinion research in places absolutely no one else will go.
She’s polled Liberians to learn what they think about water and sanitation. She’s polled Tanzanians to better understand their views on road safety. She’s polled Sri Lankans to see how they feel about their justice system, and Indonesians to assess their views of tobacco.
Her work in the former Soviet states is especially interesting. From her website:
After an early career in Warsaw in 1991, Quirk Global Strategies started working in the Caucasus and Central Asia in 2004 and Ukraine i…
