Paul Gronke

Early Voting and Turnout

Early or convenience voting—understood in this context to be relaxed administrative rules and procedures by which citizens can cast a ballot at a time and place other than the precinct on Election Day—is a popular candidate for election reformers. Typically, reformers argue that maximization of turnout is a primary goal, and reducing barriers between voters and the polls is an important method for achieving higher turnout. Arguments in favor of voting by mail, early in-person voting, and relaxed absentee requirements share this characteristic. While there are good theoretical reasons, drawn primarily from the rational choice tradition, to believe that early voting reforms should increase turnout, the empirical literature has found decidedly mixed results. While one prominent study suggests that voting by mail is associated with a 10% increase in turnout, other studies find smaller—but still statistically significant—increases in turnout associated with other convenience voting methods. This work is supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the AEI/Brookings Election Reform Project, and the Charles McKinley Fund of Reed College. Thanks to Caroline Tolbert and Daniel Smith for sharing data with us, and to David Magleby for comments on an earlier version of this paper. All responsibility for interpretations lay with the authors.

FDR to Clinton, Mueller to ?: A Field Essay on Presidential Approval

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.

Disdaining the Media: The American Public's Changing Attitudes Toward the News

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 Tims 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 Cooks 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.

U.S. Public Opinion on Torture, 2001–2009

Many journalists and politicians believe that during the Bush administration, a majority of Americans supported torture if they were assured that it would prevent a terrorist attack. As Mark Danner wrote in the April 2009 New York Review of Books , “Polls tend to show that a majority of Americans are willing to support torture only when they are assured that it will ‘thwart a terrorist attack.’” This view was repeated frequently in both left- and right-leaning articles and blogs, as well as in European papers (Sharrock 2008 ; Judd 2008 ; Koppelman 2009 ; Liberation 2008). There was a consensus, in other words, that throughout the years of the Bush administration, public opinion surveys tended to show a pro-torture American majority.

History, heterogeneity, and presidential approval: a modified ARCH approach

Abstract Since Mueller, 1973 ( War, Presidents, and Public Opinion , John Wiley, New York), the study of Presidential popularity routinely designates certain historical events as “rallying” events, especially the onset of foreign conflicts. Subsequent scholarship explores the effect of additional significant historical events (such as scandals or bad economic conditions) upon the Presidents stock of approval. This paper argues that prior research has misconceptualized “rallies”, which refer to stable increases in approval of the presidents performance, not just a short-lived spike. Volatility is an important but mostly neglected aspect of presidential approval. This paper shows how the systematic causes of volatility can be examined. Volatility increases across administrations and over time, primarily as a consequence of weakening partisan attachments. Volatility decreases during elections and after honeymoons, and presidentially relevant events vary in their effects on the mean level as well as on volatility. The results have significant implications for the support of rational political actors in the legislature and for evidence of the rationality of public opinion.

Concordance and Projection in Citizen Perceptions of Congressional Roll-Call VotIng

Research on political cognition suggests that individuals absorb and retain more information consistent with their political predispositions than they do information at odds with those predispositions. When citizens view a member of Congress favorably, they should thus be more likely to recall that members vote on a bill if it is in agreement with their own positions; additionally, if they do not recall, they will tend to assume that the member voted in accordance with their own preferences. When citizens view a representative negatively, the opposite patterns should obtain. Here, we find considerable evidence for both of these effects-concordance and projection. Attitude toward the representative and agreement on the issue substantially drive citizen perceptions of congressional roll-call voting.

Competing Redistricting Plans As Evidence of Political Motives: The North Carolina Case

Redistricting is a thoroughly political act, but the political strategies of the various actors often have been lost amid legal and representational arguments. This article looks at one set of actors—state legislators—and examines how they pursue personal and partisan interests during redistricting. Rather than treating legislators as uniform in their preferences, we divide them into two categories: those who are ambitious for higher office and those who are not. These two groups of legislators face dramatically different sets of incentives and constraints, and these differences are reflected by their strategies in the redistricting process. Using North Carolinas 1992 redistricting as exemplar, this article outlines the redistricting debates, describes the interests of the various actors, and presents an analysis of eight redistricting plans using JudgeIt. The findings indicate that members balance individual and partisan interests when proposing plans and that for ambitious legislators, individual ambition generally outweighs partisan loyalty.

Voting by Mail and Turnout in Oregon Revisiting Southwell and Burchett

In the most widely cited result on the turnout effects of voting by mail, Southwell and Burchett report that Oregon’s system increased turnout by 10 percentage points. We attempt to replicate this finding and extend the analysis to additional years to test whether the originally reported effect is due to the novelty of the first three voting by mail elections in 1995 and 1996. We are unable to reproduce earlier findings, either via replication or extending the time series to include 2010 electoral data. We find evidence for a novelty effect when all elections between 1960 and 2010 are included in our analysis, and a consistent impact of voting by mail on turnout only in special elections.

Torture and Public Opinion: The Partisan Dimension

Using a new survey dataset on torture collected during the 2008 and 2010 elections, combined with a comprehensive archive of public opinion on torture that we have assembled, we show, first, that a majority of Americans were opposed to government use of torture, even when asked about an imminent terrorist attack, until just before the 2008 election. Since then, the public has shown a slim majority in favor of torture. Second, we show that Americans’ approval of torture is a socially mediated response. That is, respondents, when evaluating whether or not the use of torture is justified, look to what they perceive others to believe, in helping them determine their response. This is true across all ideological groups. Third, we argue that increasing support for torture in the United States is almost entirely among Republican survey respondents. Independents also shifted from anti-torture to pro-torture sentiments though they show a much smaller increase in support for torture over the 2000s. The sentiments of Democratic respondents did not change; the majority of Democrats then and now remain opposed to torture.