Field experiments for the study of institutions in political science

From a paper by Christian R. Grose where he explains why scholars of institutions in political science have not as frequently embraced field experiments. He also offers ideas of potential areas of application:

Principal-agent relationships can be tested using field experiments, particularly by using bureaucrats as subjects. Decades ago, Simon (1965, 34) stated that “field experiments have not been an important procedure for learning about organizational decision making.” Today, this claim could still be made even though there is much that could be learned by employing field experiments.

It was published in the Annual Review of Political Science (Feb., 2014). 

Does Unethical Behavior Affect Choice of Profession: Public vs. Private Sector?

We studied worker self-selection into a corrupt workplace environment using a laboratory experiment with university students in India who were either private sector job aspirants or public sector aspirants (wanting to join the Indian bureaucracy). We investigated whether ones propensity to engage in unethical behavior can explain the career choice between the public and private sector. We divided the subjects into two groups: workers and supervisors. The workers performed in a real-eff ort task and the supervisors evaluated their work and sent them their earnings in tokens, which is a medium of exchange in laboratories. The supervisors had to claim the required number of tokens needed to pay the workers. The measure of cheating that we used in our experiment was the di fference between the number of tokens claimed by the supervisors and the number of tokens sent to the workers. Among the subjects, 64.5 percent engaged in unethical behavior. We then linked this cheating behavior to their future career choice. We found a signifi cant di fference in cheating behavior between public sector and private sector aspirants. Sixty-four percent of the private sector aspirants vs. 70 percent of the public sector aspirants engaged in unethical behavior. The proportion of public sector aspirants who engaged in unethical behavior was not statistically signi ficantly di fferent from that of private sector aspirants. However, the amount of cheating among public sector aspirants was signi ficantly greater than among private sector aspirants. Public sector aspirants cheated 51.5 percent more than those planning to pursue careers in the private sector.

The abstract is from this paper by Ritwik Banerjee, Tushi Baul, & Tanya Rosenblat.

The figure shows the distribution of the amount of cheating of public and private sector aspirants.

Figure 5 in the paper (page 13) is also interesting, although a little bit confusing. 

What Motivates Political Preferences? Self-Interest, Ideology, and Fairness in a Laboratory Democracy

Substantial prior literature has established that subjects in laboratory experiments are typically willing to sacrifice their own well-being to make nancial allocations more equal among participants. We tested the applicability of this result in an environment that contained some of the key contextual issues are usually excluded from more abstract games, in particular situations of income redistribution. Our general finding is that votes for a redistributive tax were almost entirely in accordance with self-interest: above-average earners vote for low tax rates and below-average earners vote for high tax rates. A measure of subjects' preferences for fairness or equality, their self-reported economic ideology, was unrelated to their behavior in this experiment. Because our ideology measure should have been correlated with any intrinsic preferences regarding inequality aversion, we conclude that any preferences for fairness or inequality that our subjects possessed were not strong enough to overcome self-interest in this context.  

Because our results seem to run counter to prior experimental evidence, it is important to interpret these results carefully. While there is evidence that people will sacrifice their own well being for others in abstract ultimatum and dictator games, there is also evidence that this willingness decreases substantially in cases where the subjects have earned their position. Our results should be taken as further confirmation of that result. Our results strongly suggest that when money to be re-distributed is earned through real effort, subjects are much less willing to sacrifice their well-being for that of others. The failure of the ideology variable to explain much about the data is more problematic and more interesting. There can be little doubt that there is substantial support for income redistribution outside of the lab, often by people who do not receive a financial benefit from redistribution. There is, however, little evidence of such behavior in our experimental society.

The also write about what is missing from the experimental design. The title of the paper by Esarey, Salmon, and Barrilleaux is "What Motivates Political Preferences? Self-Interest, Ideology, and Fairness in a Laboratory Democracy" (Economic Inquiery - one of my favorite journals, July 2012). An early draft 2007 is here.

Experimental Political Science

The rise of experiments as one of the most prominent empirical strategies has led to new advances in the study of democracy and development. So far, some experimental results have confirmed previous arguments, such as the effectiveness of clientelism as a mobilization strategy and the prevalence of political and social inequalities despite institutional innovations. Other experiments have revealed relationships that only a randomized control trial could uncover, like the fact that clientelist appeals reinforce ethnic voting and not the other way around. Finally, some experiments are revolutionizing the measurement of core concepts in the field. For example, we now know that vote buying measured experimentally is more prevalent than what observational studies suggested. 

Going forward, field experiments in collaboration with policymakers, governments, and NGOs are a promising line of research. The next round of experiments, however, faces considerable challenges, including those we have highlighted throughout this chapter. First, researchers must find creative ways to design interventions that are attractive to potential partners but that still speak convincingly to theoretically relevant questions. In doing so, researchers must pay special attention to internal validity issues. Second, a more analytical approach would help guide researchers to design experiments that enable significant accumulation of knowledge to take place. Finally, as the scope of25experimentation expands, the tradeoff between external validity and ethical concerns will become more salient.Despite these challenges, experimental research on development and democracy is a productive and exciting endeavor. As insightful as the experimental research has been up until now, numerous substantive questions remain unanswered. Hopefully the selection of studies covered in this chapter illustrate how experiments can be used as a research tool to study broader and more central questions about the relationship between democracy and development.

That is from the paper by De La O and  Wantchekon. It is here.