Gallup, Inc.
| Company type | Private employee-owned |
|---|---|
| Industry | Advisory, analytics, management consulting |
| Founded | 1935 |
| Founder | George Gallup |
| Headquarters | Washington, D.C. , United States |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people | Jon Clifton (CEO) |
| Products | Gallup Poll, Q12 employee engagement survey, CliftonStrengths, Gallup Press publications |
Number of employees | Approximately 1,500 (2023) |
| Website | gallup |
Gallup, Inc. is a global American advisory and analytics firm based in Washington, D.C.. Established by George Gallup in 1935, the company became well-known for its worldwide public opinion polling. Gallup provides organizations across the globe with analytics and management consulting solutions. Additionally, it offers educational advisory services, the CliftonStrengths evaluation and associated products, as well as business and management literature through its Gallup Press branch.
Organization
Gallup operates as a private employee-owned enterprise with its main office located in Washington, D.C.. Founded by George Gallup in 1939, the firm is headquartered in The Gallup Building and maintains between 30 and 40 offices internationally, including locations such as New York City, London, Berlin, Sydney, Singapore, and Abu Dhabi. The workforce numbers approximately 1,500 staff members. In 2022, Jon Clifton took over the CEO role from his father, Jim Clifton, who had been leading the company since 1998.
It is important to note that Gallup, Inc. is separate from the Swiss-based Gallup International Association, which George Gallup established in 1948. To safeguard its brand identity and competitive standing, Gallup has initiated legal proceedings against Gallup International and others for unauthorized use of the Gallup name.
20th century
George Gallup (1901–1984) launched the American Institute of Public Opinion—the forerunner to the Gallup Organization—in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1935. His objective was to guarantee unbiased polling by selecting samples representative of each state's electorate and to avoid conducting polls commissioned by political parties—a principle still upheld by the company.
Gallup introduced his initial political opinion poll in 1935. By 1936, Time acknowledged the precision of Gallup's data, particularly regarding U.S. presidential approval ratings. That same year, Gallup accurately forecasted Franklin Roosevelt’s win over Alfred Landon, defying predictions from The Literary Digest, which established his reputation as a pioneer in American polling. In 1938, the company broadened its scope to include market research for advertising and motion picture sectors.
By 1948, Gallup had launched polling activities in around twelve countries and distributed its polls on an international scale. The contemporary Gallup Organization was created in 1958 through the unification of all its polling operations.
Following George Gallup’s passing in 1984, his family sold the business in 1988 to Selection Research, Incorporated (SRI), a research firm based in Lincoln, Nebraska. George Gallup Jr. and Alec Gallup continued as co-chairmen and board members. George Gallup Jr. also founded the nonprofit George H. Gallup Foundation. SRI was established in 1969 by psychologist Don Clifton and specialized in market research along with personnel selection techniques, notably pioneering talent-focused structured psychological interviews.
After acquiring Gallup, SRI repositioned the company as a research and management consulting firm dedicated to assisting organizations with employee and customer challenges while maintaining its public polling activities.
During the 1990s, Gallup created the Q12 employee engagement survey, collaborated with USA Today and CNN on polling initiatives, and introduced the Clifton StrengthsFinder assessment tool.
In 1999, analysts from Gallup authored First, Break All the Rules, a bestselling management book that influenced leadership methodologies.
21st century
In 2002, Fortune Small Business highlighted that the commercial success of First, Break All the Rules played a key role in expanding Gallup's consulting operations.
By July 2013, Gallup reached a $10.5 million agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice concerning allegations related to breaches of the False Claims Act and Procurement Integrity Act. The accusations involved Gallup inflating labor hour estimates in proposals submitted to the U.S. Mint and State Department for contracts awarded without competitive bidding, which led to higher costs. Additionally, the settlement addressed inappropriate employment discussions with a former official from Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The initial complaint was filed by ex-employee Michael Lindley, who received nearly $2 million from the resolution. No formal findings of guilt or liability were made.
Gallup chose not to participate in horse-race polling during the 2016 United States presidential election, instead prioritizing its consulting service offerings. Company representatives asserted that their polling accuracy remained strong but decided to shift focus toward public opinion polling on policy issues, which aligned better with their strategic objectives. In October 2015, then editor-in-chief Frank Newport explained that concentrating on issue-driven surveys better matched Gallup’s core business goals.
Services
Aside from its well-known Gallup Poll, which contributes only a small portion of overall revenue, Gallup provides a range of research and management consulting solutions. These include the Q12 employee engagement survey and CliftonStrengths. The Q12 tool evaluates employee engagement through a set of 12 precise questions designed to enhance organizational productivity. CliftonStrengths (previously known as StrengthsFinder) identifies individual talents across 34 categories, offering detailed reports on a person’s top five strengths along with guidance for practical application. Gallup also partners with K–12 educational institutions to boost student engagement by emphasizing strengths development and administers the Gallup Student Poll in the U.S., which assesses student success through measures of hope, engagement, and well-being.
Polling in the United States
The Gallup Poll monitors public opinion on political, economic, and social topics via regular surveys. Although these polling activities have generated annual deficits near $10 million as of 2012, they maintain brand prominence that supports Gallup’s broader research consultancy. In 2019, Mohamed Younis took over from Frank Newport as editor-in-chief to lead the Gallup News division.
Gallup Daily tracking methodology
Up until 2018, Gallup Daily tracking incorporated two primary surveys: the Gallup U.S. Daily political and economic poll and the Gallup–Healthways Well-Being Index. Each day, 500 interviews were conducted across the United States on approximately 350 days per year, with about 70% completed via mobile phones and 30% through landlines. The methodology featured live interviewers utilizing a dual-frame random-digit-dial approach (including both cellphones and landlines) combined with a multi-call protocol to reach initially unavailable respondents.
Gallup’s national telephone samples were drawn using list-assisted random-digit-dial (RDD) techniques with stratification based on randomly generated phone numbers from all active exchanges plus unlisted lines. For landline interviews, adults aged 18 or older were selected using the next birthday method; this was not applied for cell phone interviews due to individual number assignments. The surveys included respondents from Alaska and Hawaii as well as Spanish-language interviews.
Typical sample sizes consisted of approximately 1,000 adults nationwide per poll, resulting in a margin of error around ±4 percentage points. Analysts at Gallup aggregated data for subgroup analyses; however, increasing sample size yielded only minor improvements in precision.
After data collection, responses were weighted to align with demographic benchmarks from U.S. Census estimates covering gender, race, age, education level, and geographic region. Weighting also adjusted for household size and cellphone usage patterns to correct for selection probabilities and nonresponse bias. This weighting process ensured that the sample accurately represented roughly 95% of U.S. households.
Precision
Between 1936 and 2008, Gallup Polls successfully anticipated the victors of U.S. presidential elections with two exceptions: in 1948, when most pollsters mistakenly predicted Dewey over Truman, and in 1976, when Ford was expected to narrowly surpass Carter. Although Gallup accurately identified the winner in 2008, it ranked 17th out of 23 polling organizations in terms of closeness to the final vote tally.
In the 2012 election, Gallup incorrectly projected Mitt Romney as the winner. Its last poll indicated Romney at 49% and Obama at 48%, while the actual outcome was Obama securing 51.1% against Romney’s 47.2%. Analyst Nate Silver rated Gallup as the least precise among 23 major pollsters, citing an average error margin of 7.2 points. Gallup’s internal review later revealed methodological issues such as insufficient sampling in Eastern and Pacific time zones, an overrepresentation of white voters, and heavy reliance on listed landline numbers, which tended to skew older.
Frank Newport, who was Gallup’s editor-in-chief at the time, highlighted that Gallup aims to estimate the national popular vote rather than predict election winners and defended its margin of error. He also criticized aggregators like Silver for analyzing existing polls instead of conducting original research.
Poll expert Mark Blumenthal observed that Gallup consistently underrepresented Black and Hispanic populations by a small margin, which reduced support for Obama by approximately 2%. Nonetheless, Blumenthal commended Gallup for its openness and urged other polling firms to similarly disclose raw data and methodologies.
Gallup’s surveys on religious affiliation came under scrutiny in 2013 due to discrepancies with other studies, such as Pew Research Center’s 2012 report showing rapid growth in the religiously unaffiliated demographic in the U.S.
A Wall Street Journal examination in 2016 compared Gallup’s unemployment rate estimates from 2010 to 2016 with those from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Despite BLS’s larger sample size, Gallup’s survey design and weighting procedures yielded figures and trends closely aligned with official government data.
Gallup World Poll
Initiated in 2005, the Gallup World Poll conducts surveys across 160 nations, encompassing over 98% of the adult global population. The poll includes more than 100 universal questions alongside region-specific items, assessing indices such as law and order, food and shelter availability, institutional quality and infrastructure, employment conditions, wellbeing, and brain gain. Gallup partners with governments, organizations, and municipalities to create tailored surveys addressing particular business or policy objectives.
The organization also releases significant reports like State of the Global Workplace, Global Emotions, and Rating World Leaders, offering critical insights for market analysis and strategic decision-making.
Gallup World Poll methodology
Gallup interviews roughly 1,000 individuals per country from the civilian population aged 15 years and older. To ensure comparability across regions, surveys are conducted in respondents’ native languages. When telephone coverage surpasses 80%, interviews are carried out via phone; otherwise, face-to-face interviewing is employed to maintain data integrity.
Surveys Regarding China
Gallup is well-known for conducting public opinion research focused on China. In a March 2023 survey, it found that only 15% of Americans viewed China favorably, marking the lowest level since Gallup began tracking this sentiment in 1979. Later, in November 2023, Gallup declared it would cease all its operations within China, where it had maintained a presence since 1993.
Gallup's Distinguished Workplace Awards
For more than fifteen years, Gallup has been recognizing organizations through the Gallup Exceptional Workplace Award. This honor is determined using the Q12 employee engagement survey, which compiles insights from over 2.7 million employees spanning more than 100,000 teams.
Gallup Press
By the year 2015, Gallup Press had released approximately thirty titles centered on business leadership and individual well-being. Recent publications include It's the Manager, Wellbeing at Work, and Blind Spot. Earlier influential works feature First, Break All the Rules and StrengthsFinder 2.0, with the latter ranking among Amazon’s top 20 best-selling books ever as of 2017.
See also
- Gallup's most admired man and woman poll
- Gallup's List of Most Widely Admired People of the 20th Century
- George H. Gallup House
- CliftonStrengths
Further reading
- Cantril, Hadley. Gauging Public Opinion (1944) online.
- Cantril, Hadley and Mildred Strunk, eds. Public Opinion, 1935–1946 (1951), comprehensive compilation of Gallup polls online
- Converse, Jean M. Survey Research in the United States: Roots and Emergence 1890–1960 (1987)
- Gallup, George, ed. The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1935–1971 (3 vol 1972), reports on thousands of Gallup polls
- Gallup, George. Public Opinion in a Democracy (1939)
- Gallup, George. The Sophisticated Poll Watcher's Guide (1972)
- Moore, David W. The Superpollsters: How They Measure and Manipulate Public Opinion in America (1995) online edition
- Roll Jr., Charles W. and Albert H. Cantril; Polls: Their Use and Misuse in Politics (1972) online edition