Experimental Political Science and the Study of Causality
From Nature to the Lab

Rebecca B. Morton and Kenneth C. Williams discuss how experiments and experimental reasoning with observational data help researchers determine causality.

Rebecca B. Morton (Author), Kenneth C. Williams (Author)

9780521136488, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 6 August 2010

608 pages, 10 b/w illus. 5 tables
22.9 x 14.7 x 4.1 cm, 0.91 kg

'Morton and Williams's review of experimental methodology and reasoning in political science will be the benchmark reference for experimental methodology in political science for years to come. It is comprehensive in its discussion of methods, scientific reasoning, and ethics, and at the same time it tears down boundaries across subfields of political science and across different approaches to experimental research in the discipline. The authors successfully argue for and carefully lay out discipline-wide standards for experimental methodology in political science. The framework provided can be fruitfully used by those who conduct lab, field, or survey experiments as well as those who use experimental reasoning with observational data.' Thomas Palfrey, California Institute of Technology

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.

Part I. Introduction: 1. The advent of experimental political science
Part II. Experimental Reasoning about Causality: 2. Experiments and causal relations
3. The causal inference problem and the Rubin causal model
4. Controlling observables and unobservables
5. Randomization and pseudo-randomization
6. Formal theory and causality
Part III. What Makes a Good Experiment?: 7. Validity and experimental manipulations
8. Location, artificiality, and related design issues
9. Choosing subjects
10. Subjects' motivations
11. History of codes of ethics and human subjects research
12. Ethical decision making and political science experiments
13. Deception in experiments
14. The future of experimental political science
15. Appendix: the experimentalist's to do list.

Subject Areas: Politics & government [JP], Research methods: general [GPS]