Experimental Political Science and the Study of CausalityFrom Nature to the Lab

• Rebecca B. Morton, New York University
• Kenneth C. Williams, Michigan State University

Increasingly, political scientists use the term 'experiment' or'experimental' to describe their empirical research. One of the primaryreasons for doing so is the advantage of experiments in establishingcausal inferences. In this book, Rebecca B. Morton and Kenneth C.Williams discuss in detail how experiments and experimental reasoningwith observational data can help researchers determine causality. Theyexplore how control and random assignment mechanisms work, examiningboth the Rubin causal model and the formal theory approaches tocausality. They also cover general topics in experimentation such asthe history of experimentation in political science; internal andexternal 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 issuesin experimentation, the process of securing approval from institutionalreview boards for human subject research, and the use of deception inexperimentation.