Advances in Experimental Methods and Designs Across the Subfields

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

In recent years, scholars of American, comparative, and international politics, have implemented exciting field, survey, and lab experiments in a host of countries and platforms, to better understand a variety of issues, including: voting behavior, conflict, trade-preferences, and intergroup prejudice. An important virtue of experimental studies is that through simple random assignment of treatments, scholars can sidestep thorny challenges of endogeneity, and provide strong causal evidence in support of theoretical frameworks. However, when designing, implementing, interpreting, and presenting experimental studies, scholars confront a variety of dilemmas, which carry important theoretical and empirical implications. Our panel brings together scholars from across all subfield in political science to present new methodological papers regarding common decisions that experimentalists confront in their research. Specifically, Leah Rosenzweig will present a paper comparing sampling strategies of online and offline populations for survey and experimental research in the developing world, evaluating a new sampling strategy of Facebook users in Kenya, Indonesia, and Mexico (coauthored with Parrish Bergquist, Matto Mildenberger, Katherine Hoffmann Pham And Francesco Rampazzo). Chagai Weiss, will present a paper on the empirical implications of adapting varying levels of abstraction and concreteness in experimental vignettes (coauthored with Ryan Brutger, Josh Kertzer, Jonathan Renshon, and Dustin Tingly). Asya Magazinnik will present a paper regarding suitable interpretations of conjoint experiments (coauthored with Scott Abramson and Korhan Kocak), and Alex Coppock will present a paper on design-based statistical graphs for randomized experiments. Together, these papers shed light on the different stages of experimental research beginning at the sampling stage, and moving on to the design, interpretation, and presentation stages. More so, this panel puts experimentalists operating in different regions and focusing on different issue areas in conversation regarding common empirical challenges common in experimental political science.

Sub Unit

• Division 8: Political Methodology

Chair

• Claire Leslie Adida UCSD

Discussant

• Jonathan Mummolo Princeton University

Individual Presentations

• What Do We Learn About Voter Preferences From Conjoint Experiments? - Asya Magazinnik, MIT; Scott Abramson, University of Rochester; Korhan Kocak, New York University Abu Dhabi

• Abstraction and Detail in Experimental Design - Ryan Brutger, University of California, Berkeley; Joshua D. Kertzer, Harvard University; Jonathan Renshon, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Dustin Halliday Tingley, Harvard University; Chagai Weiss, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Online Sample Recruitment Using Facebook: Evidence from Emerging Markets - Leah R Rosenzweig, Stanford University; Parrish Bergquist, Georgetown University; Matto Mildenberger, University of California Santa Barbara; Katherine Elizabeth Hoffmann Pham, New York University Stern School of Business; Francesco Rampazzo

• Visualize as You Randomize: Design-Based Statistical Graphs for Experiments - Alexander Coppock, Yale University