Lynn Vavreck

About

Lynn Vavreck is a professor (by courtesy) at UCLA in the Department of Communication. Her work focuses on whether political messages affect election outcomes. She has written four books about campaigns, with her latest titled THE GAMBLE, which discusses the 2012 presidential election. Her research includes conducting advertising field experiments, running large panel surveys, and collecting passive-tracking data on people's media exposure. Vavreck has watched every presidential campaign ad ever made and read every stump speech given from 1952 to 2000. Her educational background includes a Ph.D., M.S., and M.A. in Political Science from the University of Rochester, as well as a B.S. in Political Science from Arizona State University.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Business
• Psychology
• Social psychology
• Advertising
• Social Science
• Computer Security
• Law
• Sociology

Selected publications

• The small effects of political advertising are small regardless of context, message, sender, or receiver: Evidence from 59 real-time randomized experiments

  Science Advances · 2020 · 170 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Evidence across social science indicates that average effects of persuasive messages are small. One commonly offered explanation for these small effects is heterogeneity: Persuasion may only work well in specific circumstances. To evaluate heterogeneity, we repeated an experiment weekly in real time using 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign advertisements. We tested 49 political advertisements in 59 unique experiments on 34,000 people. We investigate heterogeneous effects by sender (candida…

  DOI

• Moderates

  American Political Science Review · 2022 · 97 citations

  Moderates are often overlooked in contemporary research on American voters. Many scholars who have examined moderates argue that these individuals are only classified as such due to a lack of political sophistication or conflicted views across issues. We develop a method to distinguish three ways an individual might be classified as moderate: having genuinely moderate views across issues, being inattentive to politics or political surveys, or holding views poorly summarized by a single liberal–c…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Effect of Television Advertising in United States Elections

  American Political Science Review · 2021 · 66 citations

  We provide a comprehensive assessment of the influence of television advertising on United States election outcomes from 2000–2018. We expand on previous research by including presidential, Senate, House, gubernatorial, Attorney General, and state Treasurer elections and using both difference-in-differences and border-discontinuity research designs to help identify the causal effect of advertising. We find that televised broadcast campaign advertising matters up and down the ballot, but it has m…

  DOI

• Protecting the integrity of survey research

  PNAS Nexus · 2023 · 25 citations

  Although polling is not irredeemably broken, changes in technology and society create challenges that, if not addressed well, can threaten the quality of election polls and other important surveys on topics such as the economy. This essay describes some of these challenges and recommends remediations to protect the integrity of all kinds of survey research, including election polls. These 12 recommendations specify ways that survey researchers, and those who use polls and other public-oriented s…

  PublisherDOI

• Perceptions of COVID-19 Risk: How Did People Adapt to the Novel Risk?

  Medical Decision Making · 2024-01-13 · 7 citations

  articleOpen access

  BACKGROUND: There is limited understanding of how risk perceptions changed as the US population gained experience with COVID-19. The objectives were to examine risk perceptions and determine the factors associated with risk perceptions and how these changed over the first 18 mo of the pandemic. METHODS: Seven cross-sectional online surveys were fielded between May 2020 and October 2021. The study included a population-weighted sample of 138,303 US adults drawn from a market research platform, wi…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• John Sides

  45 shared

• Seth J. Hill

  Center for the Study of Democracy

  28 shared

• Karen Sepucha

  Massachusetts General Hospital

  25 shared

• Alexander Coppock

  Yale University

  23 shared

• Ryan Baxter-King

  University of California, Los Angeles

  23 shared

• Chris Tausanovitch

  21 shared

• Michael Tesler

  University of California, Irvine

  18 shared

• Arash Naeim

  UCLA Medical Center

  16 shared

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