The Increase in Experimentation in Political Science

Increasingly, political scientists are thinking about their empirical research as in the quotation from Harrison and List, using the terms experiment or experimental to describe their approach or the reasoning behind their choices. In the coming chapters we explore in depth what researchers often mean when they use these terms (which varies depending on the researcher's perspective) and our own definitions of these terms. But before undertaking that task, which is more complicated than some readers might expect, it is noteworthy that the increasing use of these terms to describe a study, although somewhat ambiguous in meaning, suggests that a significant change in perspective in the discipline of political science is occurring. Until the past decade, experimentation seemed to have a low standing within the discipline. For example, McDermott (2002) surveyed a set of political science, psychology, and economics journals and found only 105 experimental articles by political scientists she labels as “established” from 1926 to 2000, with only 57 of these in political science journals.