Caroline Tolbert

Caroline Tolbert is Professor of Political Science at the University of Iowa and the author of more than a half dozen books, as well as dozens of articles in scholarly journals. Her research explores political behavior, elections and representation widely defined.

Tolbert is coauthor of Digital Citizenship: The Internet Society and Participation (Cambridge, MIT Press, 2008) and Virtual Inequality: Beyond the Digital Divide (Georgetown University Press, 2003). Digital Citizenship was ranked one of 20 best-selling titles in the social sciences by the American Library Association for 2008. In 2011 she published Why Iowa? How Caucuses and Sequential Elections Improve the Presidential Nominating Process (University of Chicago Press) with D. Redlawsk and T. Donovan). She is also coauthor of Educated by Initiative: The Effects of Direct Democracy on Citizens and Political Organizations in the American States (University of Michigan, 2004), co-editor of Democracy in the States: Experiments in Election Reform (Brookings Institution Press, 2008) and Citizens as Legislators: Direct Democracy in the United States (Ohio State University Press, 1998). Her latest book is Digital Cities: The Internet and Geography of Opportunity under contract with Oxford University Press (with K. Mossberger and W. Franko).

Tolbert was the General Program Chair (with T. Lee, UC Berkeley) of the 2008 Midwest Political Science Association Meeting. Caroline Tolbert is the former Co-Director of The University of Iowa Hawkeye Poll (with D. Redlawsk, Rutgers University). In 2009 she was named a Collegiate Scholar by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Iowa for excellence in teaching and scholarship.