Value-added and Transparent Experiments
| Author | Daniel Rubenson,Peter John Loewen |
| DOI | 10.1177/14789299211059428 |
| Date | 01 May 2022 |
| Published date | 01 May 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Experiments with Politicians: Ethics, Power, and the Boundaries of Political Science |
https://doi.org/10.1177/14789299211059428
Political Studies Review
2022, Vol. 20(2) 243 –249
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/14789299211059428
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Value-added and Transparent
Experiments
Peter John Loewen1
and Daniel Rubenson2
Abstract
Experimental research by political scientists on elites has grown dramatically in recent years.
Experimenting on and with elites raises important questions, both practical and ethical. Elites
are busy people, doing important work under public scrutiny. Therefore, any experiments that
use up political elites’ time, risk impairing their ability to do their jobs as well as possible, or
put at risk the larger research community’s access to elites should be avoided. Nevertheless,
despite these risks and challenges, we argue experimenting with elites has enough benefits both
to the research community and to elites themselves, that it should still be done. The relevant
question then becomes how should we think about doing experiments with political elites? We
propose a framework of value-added and transparent experiments. Our framework is guided by
the following two simple rules: Elite subjects should individually benefit from the process of
doing the experiment. It should add value to their role as representatives. Second, the identity
of the researchers and purposes of the experiment should be transparent. As we argue, these
two combined features can still accommodate a large range of experiments, can creatively spark
researchers to think up new designs and can protect access to elites for future research. We
review two such examples at the end of this essay.
Keywords
experiments, comparative politics, political behaviour, methods
Accepted: 8 October 2021
Introduction
Audit experiments are widely used in political science (Butler and Crabtree, 2021; Grose,
2021). These experiments typically take the form of an experimental subject interacting
with another individual or organization, except that the second actor is a confederate of
the experiment (see Butler et al., 2012), and may not be a real person at all (e.g. Butler
and Broockman, 2011; Pfaff et al., 2021). For example, the experiment may take the form
1Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
2Department of Politics, Ryerson University, Toronto, ON, Canada
Corresponding author:
Peter John Loewen, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto, Toronto,
ON M5S 0A7, Canada.
Email: peter.loewen@utoronto.ca
1059428PSW0010.1177/14789299211059428Political Studies ReviewLoewen and Rubenson
research-article2021
Symposia and New Ideas
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