Workshop: Advances in Experimental Political Science: Evanston, IL

Northwestern University, Evanston IL

Investigators

Abstract

Experiments are a central methodology in political science. Scholars from every subfield regularly turn to experiments. Practitioners rely on experimental evidence in evaluating social programs, policies, institutions, and information provision. It is thus not surprising that experiments constitute an integral part of undergraduate and graduate curricula. Over the last five years, approaches to social science experimentation have evolved greatly, due in part to the "replication crisis" - that is, findings of low replication rates of experiments. At the same time, political scientists have expanded the reach of experiments by tapping new data sources (e.g., elite samples) and introducing methods that had previously received scant attention in the discipline (e.g., conjoint experiments). In order to ensure that the discipline successfully navigates questions about the reliability and replicability of experiments and fully exploits methodological advances, the project would gather participants for a workshop, "Advances in Experimental Political Science." The workshop papers will later be published in a volume by the same name. This is a follow-up to a 2009 workshop on experimentation supported by the National Science Foundation, and the resulting publication of the widely-used Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Political Science. That workshop and volume came at a time when experiments were still an emergent methodology in political science. The aforementioned debates and developments mean that we are now at a crucial time to hold another workshop and publish a new collected volume. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.