Novel collection of essays addressing contemporary trends in political science, covering a broad array of methodological and substantive topics.

This volume provides the first comprehensive overview of how political scientists have used experiments to transform their field of study.

Increasingly, political scientists use the term 'experiment' or 'experimental' to describe their empirical research. One of the primary reasons for doing so is the advantage of experiments in establishing causal inferences. In this book, Rebecca B. Morton and Kenneth C. Williams discuss in detail how experiments and experimental reasoning with observational data can help researchers determine causality. They explore how control and random assignment mechanisms work, examining both the Rubin causal model and the formal theory approaches to causality. They also cover general topics in experimentation such as the history of experimentation in political science; internal and external validity of experimental research; types of experiments - field, laboratory, virtual, and survey - and how to choose, recruit, and motivate subjects in experiments. They investigate ethical issues in experimentation, the process of securing approval from institutional review boards for human subject research, and the use of deception in experimentation.

Experiments are a central methodology in the social sciences. Scholars from every discipline regularly turn to experiments. Practitioners rely on experimental evidence in evaluating social programs, policies, and institutions. This book is about how to “think” about experiments. It argues that designing a good experiment is a slow moving process (given the host of considerations) which is counter to the current fast moving temptations available in the social sciences. The book includes discussion of the place of experiments in the social science process, the assumptions underlying different types of experiments, the validity of experiments, the application of different designs, how to arrive at experimental questions, the role of replications in experimental research, and the steps involved in designing and conducting “good” experiments. The goal is to ensure social science research remains driven by important substantive questions and fully exploits the potential of experiments in a thoughtful manner.

Population-based survey experiments have become an invaluable tool for social scientists struggling to generalize laboratory-based results, and for survey researchers besieged by uncertainties about causality. Thanks to technological advances in recent years, experiments can now be administered to random samples of the population to which a theory applies. Yet until now, there was no self-contained resource for social scientists seeking a concise and accessible overview of this methodology, its strengths and weaknesses, and the unique challenges it poses for implementation and analysis. Drawing on examples from across the social sciences, this book covers everything you need to know to plan, implement, and analyze the results of population-based survey experiments. But it is more than just a "how to" manual. This lively book challenges conventional wisdom about internal and external validity, showing why strong causal claims need not come at the expense of external validity, and how it is now possible to execute experiments remotely using large-scale population samples. Designed for social scientists across the disciplines, Population-Based Survey Experiments provides the first complete introduction to this methodology. Offers the most comprehensive treatment of the subjectFeatures a wealth of examples and practical adviceReexamines issues of internal and external validityCan be used in conjunction with downloadable data from ExperimentCentral.org for design and analysis exercises in the classroom

The Advances in Experimental Social Psychology series is the premier outlet for reviews of mature, high-impact research programs in social psychology. Contributions to the series provide defining pieces of established research programs, reviewing and integrating thematically related findings by individual scholars or research groups. Topics discussed in Volume 61 include Worldview Conflict and Prejudice, Money and Happiness, Attitude Representation, Emotion Regulation, and Social Perception.

This research collection offers a 34-article tour of recent advances and the current state of 5 important and booming areas of empirical methodology: Bayesian methods; modelling of temporal duration, dependence, and dynamics; network-analytic methodology; text, classification, and big-data analytic methods; methods for nonparametric and design-based causal inference. These prominent articles, written by leading scholars, break new ground and provide definitive statements of the current best practices in those respective areas. Together they describe the cutting-edge profile of modern empirical methodology for applied empirical analysis in political science. This is an essential resource for those studying and researching political methodology.

Written by well-established researchers in behavioural economics, this Research Agenda illustrates the application of incentivised decision-making experiments, highlighting how this can add a new and novel dimension to social science research. Informative and timely, it explores how experiments are being used by pioneers in a diverse range of fields when research questions may not be amenable to field studies, vignettes or surveys.

Throughout the world, voters lack access to information about politicians, government performance, and public services. Efforts to remedy these informational deficits are numerous. Yet do informational campaigns influence voter behavior and increase democratic accountability? Through the first project of the Metaketa Initiative, sponsored by the Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP) research network, this book aims to address this substantive question and at the same time introduce a new model for cumulative learning that increases coordination among otherwise independent researcher teams. It presents the overall results (using meta-analysis) from six independently conducted but coordinated field experimental studies, the results from each individual study, and the findings from a related evaluation of whether practitioners utilize this information as expected. It also discusses lessons learned from EGAP's efforts to coordinate field experiments, increase replication of theoretically important studies across contexts, and increase the external validity of field experimental research.

This book, which comprises eight chapters, presents a comprehensive critical survey of the results and methods of laboratory experiments in economics. The first chapter provides an introduction to experimental economics as a whole, with the remaining chapters providing surveys by leading practitioners in areas of economics that have seen a concentration of experiments: public goods, coordination problems, bargaining, industrial organization, asset markets, auctions, and individual decision making. The work aims both to help specialists set an agenda for future research and to provide nonspecialists with a critical review of work completed to date. Its focus is on elucidating the role of experimental studies as a progressive research tool so that wherever possible, emphasis is on series of experiments that build on one another. The contributors to the volume--Colin Camerer, Charles A. Holt, John H. Kagel, John O. Ledyard, Jack Ochs, Alvin E. Roth, and Shyam Sunder--adopt a particular methodological point of view: the way to learn how to design and conduct experiments is to consider how good experiments grow organically out of the issues and hypotheses they are designed to investigate.