Field Experiment Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Field experiments, as distinct from laboratory experiments, are randomized interventions that take place in naturalistic settings. Field experiments are principally designed to establish causal relationships. Well-executed field experiments combine the strengths of randomized designs with the external validity of field studies. While a laboratory study, for example, might examine the effects of political advertising on voter turnout by exposing treatment and control groups to different advertising stimuli within an artificial setting and gauging their vote intentions by means of a survey, a field experiment would randomly manipulate the content and timing of actual advertisement campaigns and attempt to link these varied interventions to observed patterns of voting. Both types of studies use randomization, but the latter has the advantage of linking cause and effect in terms that have direct real-world applicability.

Although field experimentation is in principle a strong research methodology, in practice it faces important ethical and pragmatic constraints. Rarely do social scientists have the opportunity or authority to manipulate the variables of most interest to them, such as culture, political systems, economic prosperity, and the like. Even in situations wherein random interventions are attempted, they are sometimes undone by the people charged with implementing them. Political campaigns participating in a field experiment may be tempted to influence the control group in an effort to garner additional votes.

The challenge of orchestrating field experiments and maintaining the integrity of the randomization means that they tend to occur in a small number of sites that are chosen for reasons of convenience rather than through systematic sampling procedures. This constraint raises the issue of whether the study’s conclusions apply only to the types of people who actually participate in an experiment. Replication is the appropriate response to concerns about drawing conclusions based on studies of particular times, places, and people.

A further complication arises when experimental subjects refuse to participate in the study or cannot be reached for treatment. Although noncompliance diminishes the power of an experimental design, it is a remediable problem as long as the decision to participate is unrelated to the strength of the treatment effect. The statistical correction is to perform an instrumental variables regression in which the independent variable is whether a subject was actually treated and the instrumental variable is whether a subject was originally assigned to the treatment group. The resulting effect estimate is termed the “treatment-on-treated” effect because it is the effect of the treatment on those who actually receive it. The severity of attrition problems depends on whether there is differential attrition for treatment and control groups.

Despite these challenges, field experimentation has grown dramatically in political science since the late 1990s, as scholars have sought to assess the effectiveness of interventions ranging from voter mobilization tactics to tax compliance to lobbying. Scholars have also become increasingly adept at seizing opportunities to study naturally occurring randomization, such as judicial assignments, ballot order, and the representation of women in local governance. The continued growth of field experimentation depends on whether policy makers and political actors can be convinced to incorporate random assignment when deploying resources across time or space, so that they and the scholarly community can rigorously assess the effects of their interventions.

Bibliography:

Angrist, Joshua D., Guido W. Imbens, and Donald B. Rubin. “Identification of Causal Effects Using Instrumental Variables.” Journal of the American Statistical Association 91 (June 1996): 444–455.
Druckman, James N., Donald P. Green, James H. Kuklinski, and Arthur Lupia. “The Growth and Development of Experimental Research in Political Science.” American Political Science Review 100, no. 4 (2006): 627–635.
Green, Donald P., and Alan S. Gerber. “Reclaiming the Experimental Tradition in Political Science.” In Political Science:The State of the Discipline, 3d ed., edited by Helen V. Milner and Ira Katznelson, 805–832. New York: Norton, 2002.
Morton, Rebecca, and Kenneth Williams. From Nature to the Lab: The Methodology of Experimental Political Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.
Shadish,William R.,Thomas D. Cook, and Donald T. Campbell. Experimental and Quasi-experimental Designs for Generalized Causal Inference. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002.