Lorelei Moosbrugger, PhD

Lorelei Moosbrugger is a lecturer in Political Science at the University of California, SantaBarbara. Her research focuses on the quality of governance; specifically, on how electoral institutions affect government responsiveness to majority preferences for public goods. Born and raised in a factory town in the Midwest, Lorelei is especially concerned with government capacity to meet the needs of its least powerful citizens when they conflict with the desires of powerful interest groups who have privileged access to policymakers and policymaking forums. 

Professor Moosbrugger’s research on how electoral institutions shape interest group influence on agricultural and environmental policies was conducted as a Fulbright Scholar to the European Union with funding from the Institute for the Study of World Politics and MacArthurFoundation. In “The Vulnerability Thesis: Interest Group Influence and Institution Design” (YaleUniversity Press 2012), she ranks democracies on a continuum of political vulnerability and develops a theory to explain why politicians in two-party systems are more vulnerable to interest group demands than their counterparts in multiparty systems. Dr. Moosbrugger’s current research investigates the relationship between electoral institutions, variance in the political sophistication of voters and consistent patterns of cross-national difference in vote choice. 

Professor Moosbrugger joined the Advisory Board because she believes that single-member district plurality elections are the worst way to elect representatives – they limit choice to one of two big parties, reduce incentives to vote and reduce incentives for voters to be informed. To make matters worse, primaries empower the extremes and exacerbate two-party systems’ incentives for tribalism. As a result, gerrymandering designed to secure one-party dominance ultimately prevents more moderate voters from holding their party accountable at the polls without defecting to the other side. To help foster change, she lends her expertise to several organizations working to reform our elections, also serving on the Advisory Board ofRanktheVote.us and on the Board of Directors of Californians for Electoral Reform.