Jan 18, 2008 6:29 PM

She's out on the campaign trail

Like all faculty, Lynn Vavreck, assistant professor in the Department of Political Science, has her hands full with her research and a full teaching load. But every four years — like clockwork — her life gets even busier.

Vavreck's area of specialization is campaigns and elections, and come voting time she is in demand as an expert on a number of issues, including presidential politics, primaries, campaign contributions and media coverage.

She recently returned from the Jan. 3 Iowa caucus where she presented research on the importance of "retail politics," the practice of candidates going out into the community for some one-on-one contact with their constituents. Retail politics, Vavreck said, "is not wholesale advertising that's broadcast through mass media. It's personal, and that kind of campaigning is very important."

Vavreck claimed that moments like Hillary Clinton tearing up in a New Hampshire diner only gain traction because they are not staged media events for mass communication, but instead are one-on-one moments between the candidates and a few voters. If Clinton had cried in a paid advertisement, the subsequent discussion of her emotions would have been much different, Vavreck said.

In 2002, Vavreck published work that shows that people like candidates more after meeting them in this kind of small setting, but voters are also more likely to go meet the candidates about whom they already have favorable impressions.

Vavreck has just completed a book, tentatively titled "An Economic Theory of Campaigns," that describes the importance of the nation's economy to presidential election outcomes. It's well known, she said, that the incumbent party candidate will win an election 80%-90% of the time during a good economy. But in the few cases where they don't win, Vavreck writes, it's because they failed to remind people how good they had it.

"If you get drawn into talking about a war or about race or about going to the moon, then you don't get the benefit of the economy," she added. "It's like Richard Nixon in 1960, or Hubert Humphrey in 1968. These are candidates who were drawn into talking about what their opponents wanted to talk about, instead of reminding people that the economy was actually growing."

A political junkie since her undergraduate days at Arizona State University, Vavreck was a graduate student there when she got the chance to volunteer for the Bush/Quayle presidential campaign in 1992. Her expert handling of a last-minute dry-cleaning request by the vice president's chief of staff earned her a job at the White House, where she worked until the election was over.

Vavreck ultimately received her Ph.D. in 1997 from the University of Rochester and completed her postdoc at Princeton University, where she met her husband, Jeff Lewis, also a political scientist. She accepted a tenure track position at Dartmouth College, but once she and Lewis got married two years later, the couple realized that they "had to find jobs at the same place." Both are now on faculty at UCLA.

As a political analyst, Vavreck said, she tries to be objective when it comes to political parties. As an independent, she's voted for both Democrats and Republicans, "candidates that I think are effective problem-solvers." As for this year's presidential election, Vavreck is still undecided. "I have a set of people, but I'm not sure who, if any, will end up among the final choices," she said, laughing. "But I will say that they cross party lines. I have choices on both sides."

1