Andrew Kohut

Kohut was born on September 2, 1942, and grew up in Rochelle Park, New Jersey. He graduated from Seton Hall University in 1964 and entered graduate school at Rutgers. He left without completing a degree in 1966 to work at Gallup, where he spent about 23 years.⁠[1]

According to the Roper Center’s biography, Kohut earned an A.B. degree at Seton Hall University and studied sociology at Rutgers University from 1964 to 1966.⁠[2]

Kohut was president of the Gallup Organization from 1979 to 1989. After leaving, he formed and co-owned Princeton Survey Research Associates with Diane Colasanto; its research included media, politics and public policy.⁠[2]

In 1987, Kohut, Norman Ornstein and Larry McCarthy directed the first political typology study. Drawing on numerous survey questions across nine substantive dimensions, it classified Americans into ten political groups. Pew later repeated the research to examine differences in political values and attitudes beyond party labels.⁠[3]

The Times Mirror company created the Center for the People & the Press in 1990. Kohut became its director in 1993; in 1996 The Pew Charitable Trusts became its sponsor and renamed it the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. The earlier project was a predecessor of the broader Pew Research Center, which was established later.⁠[4]

Kohut served as president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research in 1994–1995 and received its Award for Exceptionally Distinguished Achievement in 2005. He also led the National Council on Public Polls and received the Roper Center’s Warren J. Mitofsky Award in 2014.⁠[2]

The Roper Center records that Kohut conducted international polling with Madeleine Albright after the Cold War and created the Pew Global Attitudes Project in 2001. The project extended survey research across countries to examine public views on international and domestic issues.⁠[2]

In 2004, The Pew Charitable Trusts established Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C., to bring together several information initiatives, with Kohut as its first president. Alongside research on the public and the press, the initiatives concerned journalism, the internet, religion, Hispanic communities and global attitudes.⁠[4]

In 2012 Pew Research Center announced that Kohut planned to step down as president at year-end and continue as a senior research adviser, focusing on research practices and international and domestic public opinion analysis.⁠[5]

Kohut died on September 8, 2015. Cornell UniversityCornell UniversityCornell University is a private research university in Ithaca, New York, and a member of the Ivy League. It is New York State's federal land-grant university, a distinction unique within the Ivy League. Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White founded the university in 1865, and it opened in 1868. In addition to its Ithaca campus, Cornell operates Weill Cornell Medicine and Cornell Tech in New York City and a medical college in Qatar. It enrolled 26,793 students in fall 2024. Its president is Michael I. Kotlikoff.Open the full entry’s Roper Center holds his personal papers, including correspondence, writings, speeches and survey material, available to researchers under the archive’s access rules.⁠[1]

A remembrance published by the American Association for Public Opinion Research says Kohut emphasized clear survey questions that ordinary respondents could understand. It also recalls his attention to nonresponse and telephone coverage, and his insistence that reports communicate their most important findings clearly.⁠[6]

Kohut wrote about public opinion for newspapers and scholarly journals and frequently discussed polling on National Public Radio and PBS NewsHour. He co-authored four books, including America Against the World and The Diminishing Divide.⁠[7]

Pew Research Center official website: https://www.pewresearch.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[7]

Andrew Kohut personal collection at the Roper Center: https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/andrew-kohut-personal-collection (opens in a new window).⁠[1]