Gronke, Galanes-Rosenbaum, Miller et al., – 2008 – Convenience Voting

Abstract:

Forms of convenience votingearly in-person voting, voting by mail, absentee voting, electronic voting, and voting by faxhave be- come the mode of choice for >30% of Americans in recent elections. Despite this, and although nearly every state in the United States has adopted at least one form of convenience voting, the academic re- search on these practices is unequally distributed across important questions. A great deal of literature on turnout is counterbalanced by a dearth of research on campaign effects, election costs, ballot quality, and the risk of fraud. This article introduces the theory of convenience voting, reviews the current literature, and suggests areas for future research.

Gronke – 2008 – Early Voting Reforms and American Elections

Gronke, Cook – 2007 – Disdaining the Media- The American Public’s Changing Attitudes Toward the News

Abstract:

After spending two decades studying the news media as an institution, Tim Cook turned his attention to public attitudes about the press, a topic that lurked behind much of his work, most prominently Governing with the News, but one that he had never addressed directly in print. As was typically the case with Tim’s voracious intellectual appetite, the project grew into a larger study of public trust and confidence in institutions. This piece represents the first fruits of this collaboration, addressing what began our inquiry: what was the cause of the long known, but seldom explained, decline in pubic confidence in the press? Was it because they had become, in Cook’s words, just another “governing” institution? Or was there something distinct about the press as an institution in the array of public attitudes about the social and political world? In this piece, we demonstrate how confidence in the press is distinct from generalized confidence in other social and political institutions. In particular, we find that the same political indicators that lead to higher confidence in institutions in general drive down confidence in the press. We close by speculating on likely future trends given the adversarial tenor of press coverage.

Gronke, Newman – 2003 – FDR to Clinton, Mueller to?: A Field Essay on Presidential Approval

Abstract:

Since the 1930s, polling organizations have asked Americans whether they “approve or disapprove of the job the incumbent is doing as president.” In the early 1970s, John Mueller started an academic industry by asking what drives these evaluations. American politics and the tools available to examine it have changed dramatically since then, inspiring a burst of research on presidential approval in the 1990s. We review this new body of literature, arguing that it builds on but differs importantly from earlier approval studies. Since Mueller’s writing, scholars have expanded his relatively simple model, taking account of presidents’ goals and personal characteristics, other political actors, the ubiquitous media, and an inattentive public. We describe three waves of research, focusing on the most recent wave. We suggest that history, along with new intellectual currents, data, and methods have enabled each wave to incorporate more of political, social, and psychological reality. Finally, we identify the issues most likely to motivate presidential approval research for the next ten years.