What Moves an Electorate? Political Narratives in a Polarized World

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Tuesday, October 22, 2024
12:15 PM
UCLA School of Law, Rm 1314
385 Charles E Young Drive East
Los Angeles, CA 90095

ABOUT THE DISCUSSION

Elections have shown that voters can move, between candidates but also to vote at all. Do we know what type of political messaging moves an electorate, what resonates, what persuades? It is an age-old question that has occupied campaign and communication strategists, politicians, political advisors, and media experts, among others, since political campaigning began. Celebrity endorsements are often courted and always gratefully received. But to what extent can endorsements by celebrities such as Taylor Swift, Dick Cheney or Liz Cheney actually move the needle?

In an environment where politics appear calcified, where communication is hampered by disinformation and by extreme polarization, where issues are wrapped up in questions of identity and personal values, both notoriously hard to change - what can make the difference? Is there something we can learn from recent elections elsewhere, such as in Europe? What are we not seeing, what are we not understanding?

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Andrea Römmele is Professor of Political Communication and Vice President at the Hertie School in Berlin. Her research interests include comparative political communication, political parties and election campaigns. She was Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Modern German Studies 2012/13 at the University of California in Santa Barbara, Visiting Fellow at Johns Hopkins University in Washington DC and at the Australian National University in Canberra. She earned her master's degree from San Francisco State University as part of a cross-registration program with the University of California at Berkeley, her doctorate from the University of Heidelberg and her habilitation from the Free University of Berlin. She was a member of the election campaign teams of Gerhard Schröder and Hillary Clinton. In 2024, Andrea Römmele is a Thomas Mann Fellow in Los Angeles. Here she is working on megatrends and democracy. Her most recent book Demokratie Neu Denken (Rethinking Democracy) was published in September 2024.

Lynn Vavreck, Marvin Hoffenberg Professor of American Politics and Public Policy, UCLA Department of Political Science, is an expert on campaigns, elections and public opinion, with an emphasis on how candidate behavior affects voters. She has researched campaign advertising, survey methods, politics and the media, and how the state of the economy affects elections.

Vavreck is co-author of The Bitter End: The 2020 Presidential Campaign and the Challenge to American Democracy, which assessed why the campaign’s aftershocks will reverberate for decades to come. She is also the co-author of Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America. Both books drew observations and insights from Nationscape, a wide-ranging weekly public opinion survey of the American electorate for which Vavreck is a principal researcher.

She also co-authored The Gamble: Choice and Chance in the 2012 Presidential Election and has contributed to The Upshot, a data-driven blog about politics and policy at the New York Times.

ABOUT THE MODERATOR

Alexandra Lieben is the Deputy Director of the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations and an affiliated faculty member of the Promise Institute for Human Rights at the UCLA School of Law. A certified mediator, she teaches constructive communication, alternative dispute resolution, public dialogue, cultural competency, international conflict resolution, and community and economic development to undergraduate and graduate students at UCLA.