INTERVIEW
VANDERBILT POLITICAL REVIEW
Interview: Dr. John Zaller
Interview conducted by Christopher Jerrolds ‘14
Dr. John R. Zaller is a visiting scholar at Vanderbilt’s Center for the Study of Democratic
Institutions (CSDI), as well as a professor of political science at the University of California, Los
Angeles. He sat down with the Vanderbilt Political Review to discuss his research.
VPR: Can you give us a brief description
of what you’re studying at Vanderbilt and
what brought you to decide upon that?
We’re studying nominations for the
House of Representative. The reason that
we’re studying them is because parties define
themselves by the candidates they nominate,
including the extent to which they are polarized or not. This is something that explains a
lot, potentially, about American politics, and
it hasn’t been studied at all. I began studying
parties in the late nineties, and some graduate
students and I wrote a book called Th