Show Summary Details

Page of

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 06 December 2019

Abstract and Keywords

This article presents an overview of field experiments and their contribution to the study of political behavior. First, it briefly outlines the history of field experimentation in political science and neighboring disciplines. It then summarizes a series of important and interrelated research literatures, exploring the influences of political campaigns, political communication, and political socialization. The review shows that the advent of field experimentation represents a significant departure from what had been a field dominated by survey and lab research. Furthermore, the ways in which field experimental studies shaped the research in political behavior are addressed. Field experimental studies have brought a new level of precision to the study of campaign communication. The principal argument for observational research is that it enables scholars to study a broad class of causal questions, not just those that are amenable to experimental manipulation.

Keywords: political behavior, field experiments, political campaigns, political communication, political socialization, campaign communication

Tiffany C. Davenport

Tiffany C. Davenport is a doctoral student in Political Science at Yale University.

Alan S. Gerber

Alan S. Gerber is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for the Study of American Politics, Yale University.

Donald P. Green

Donald P. Green (Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley) is Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. The author of four books and more than one hundred essays, Green's research interests span a wide array of topics: voting behavior, partisanship, campaign finance, hate crime, and research methods. Much of his current work uses field experimentation to study the ways in which political campaigns mobilize and persuade voters, but he has also conducted experimental research on the effects of the mass media, civic education classes, and criminal sentencing. With Alan Gerber, he recently co-authored a textbook on this research method titled Field Experiments: Design, Analysis, and Interpretation (W.W. Norton, 2012).

Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.

Please subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.

For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.