Paper for the ECPR General Conference 2015 Teaching Experimental Political Science – Reloaded Ulrich Hamenstädt, University of Muenster, [email protected] Abstract For many decades, experimental methods in political science played the role of a “Sleeping Beauty”. When browsing through the top journals of our discipline, it is noticeable that this has changed to the greatest possible extent. In recent years we thus have a growing demand for teaching experimental methods within the scope of university courses. In 2012, I wrote an article titled “Teaching Experimental Political Science” for the European Political Science journal. In contrast to that article, I would now argue that methods in Social Science should be taught based on students’ projects. This paper therefore updates my old paper and presents alternative teaching concepts. Consequently this paper argues that experiments in political science should be taught to give a general introduction to the topic, present design examples, discuss specific problems and make the students work on small group projects. Introduction For decades, experiments have not been part of the methodological toolbox for political scientists. One of the most famous quotes in this context comes from an early issue of the American Political Science Review, defining the discipline as non-experimental science (Lowell, 1910; quoted by Druckman et al, 2011). However, this has dramatically changed since the mid-90s (Druckman et al, 2006; Morton and Williams, 2010). There are different reasons for these changes (Hamenstädt, 2012b): technical developments, an enhanced cost-benefit ratio, new research questions raised within the discipline, etc. These changes also lead to a growing demand for teaching experimental methods within the scope of university courses. Experiments can also be seen as a gold standard for deductive, hypotheses testing research designs – therefore teaching experimental political science is a salient approach to introduce research designs to students. Getting research started with a precise question, a testable hypothesis, an overview of what will roughly happen during the research process – in short: writing a research proposal for an own project – is one of the hardest things to do for undergraduate students (and often for researchers, too). Yet students have to get used to think systematically about their research; about how they convert an idea into a research proposal. This is 1 what we, as lecturers and docents, have to teach them and the best way to do it is to let them try it under guidance, giving constant (personal) feedback, assigning project work in small groups, and encouraging (peer) feedback for their projects (Blair et al, 2013a; Blair et al, 2013b). The importance of teaching experimental designs to undergraduate students has already been discussed in an article from 2011/12 in European Political Science (Hamenstädt, 2012a). However, the prior article in EPS presented a course that was (implicitly) rooted in the idea of explaining a method to students and let them repeat or reproduce the content of selected articles and book chapters about experiments. So the course design – described in the old article – was denoted by a “disassociation between research in theory […] and research in practice” (Ryan et al, 2013: 85). In contrast to the old article, this one argues (1.) that notably for method courses, it is important for students “to get their hands dirty” –meaning that they should work on a small project throughout or at least by the end of the course. (2.) It is also of vital importance for an enriching course to work with adequate examples. On the one hand, statistic books often use (extremely) simplified data sets, designed for the use of unambiguous statistical models. On the other hand, textbooks for methods – like the classical textbook for experiments from Shadish, Cook, and Campbell (2002) – work with examples that are not from the field of political science. It is surely easier for most people to understand an experimental design by taking examples from medicine and it might be good to discuss difficult terms like ‘validity’ before talking about experimental designs at all. In contrast, this paper argues that it is best to provide students with examples from their own discipline and discuss them – experimental political science is very much an interdisciplinary approach und therefore confusing enough for many students, so we might carefully challenge them with “transfer tasks” – by transfer tasks I mean, discussing e.g. the methodology of medical studies and transferring them to political science. In addition, it is also my impression that it is much easier to discuss challenging methodological points with the students when you can draw from specific examples you dealt with in the course of the seminar. So the paper suggests starting with examples (from political science) before presenting a methodological problem to the plenum. The paper will (thus) work out the foundation for the two key arguments and in doing so, it will bring the setup of the course I presented three years ago into question. In the course of the paper we will have in the first section a look at the course structure, which is a “reloaded” version of the paper from 2012 (Hamenstädt, 2012a). In the second section of the paper, the students’ feedback and the lecturer’s experiences from the course are reflected. Lastly, the concluding section discusses the arguments “against” the old version of the paper, raised in the introduction. 2 Course structure The course was divided into four blocks. Each of them consisted of three to four teaching units (á 90 minutes). The first block was dominated by inputs from the lecturer and by classroom experiments in order to give the students a feeling for the teaching and learning content. The teaching goal of this first block was to show the students what kind of questions in political science could be answered with the “ideal type” of laboratory experiments. The readings for the first block focused on articles that gave an overview of political science methods and demonstrated where experiments could be located within the “methodological toolbox”. Work in small groups based on these readings was accompanied by inputs by the docent as well as by classroom experiments. The aim of using classroom experiments as a teaching tool was to establish a sequence to criticize experiments: What was the experiment about? What did it have to do with political science? What went well and what went wrong during the experiment? What could we learn from the classroom experiment about conducting experiments in general? It was easy for the students to criticise those little classroom experiments, because there is often something that goes wrong in a suboptimal environment like a classroom. Figure 1 gives an example of one game that was played in class, and which was given to the students – together with a general introduction of how to play “the game”. Figure 1: “Tragedy of the Commons”- game Let’s start with a little game… In this example, the students were easily You have four carts. Two of them are red and two of them are black. Each round you have to give two cards to your neighbor. Black cards count no points. about how a common good is produced A red card gives you 10 point, if you keep it after a couple of rounds. This led us back and 5 points to your group, if you give your card to the group. Round able to determine that the game was Points Round Points Test round to the issue like the question why we need a state to organise the production of common goods, why we need 1 6 2 7 3 8 4 9 5 10 Count Count taxation and when, the free-rider problem, etc. One might also give each group the possibility to let someone give a short speech – which can serve to create a within-research design of the experiment. Also, there will be some discussion between the students during Add each round the points you got from the red card(s) you keep (10 points) to the points your group collects for the round. the experiment – in how far does this 3 influence the results and how can we prevent such disturbances in the experimental set-up? All this can be discussed with the students after this “Tragedy of the Commons”-game and my experience is that the students had a lot to share about the experiment after they have participated in it. So this experiment can also be a good example to discuss e.g. the distinction of “between-” and “within“research-designs. I suggest using veconlab1 and maybe other web portals for teaching. If your classroom allows the students to have access to the web, those platforms can be of additional value – not least because students tend to use the web access for checking their emails, just like many experimental subjects do in pools. That tells the class a lot about what might happen in a web experiment. The second block of the course shall then deal with different forms of experiments. Starting from laboratory experiments, you can go on to other common forms of experiments, like fieldexperiments, survey-experiments and last but not least natural experiments. Each form of experiments stresses the “ideal type” of experimental design in its own way. My suggestion is to choose one journal article reporting an experiment for a student’s presentation and assign an overview chapter from the Handbook of Experimental Political Science (Druckman et al, 2011) to the other students from the course. In the third block, specific problems of experimental designs are to be discussed. Those are the questions of causality – and how that in turn could be operationalised within a research design – and questions of validity in research designs. Ethics might be of importance to discuss as well, since it is a classical cross-sectional topic that will appear in the discussion of many experiments. That sounds like theoretical and maybe humdrum work: and it indeed is. Yet it is also important for the students to learn to reflect their knowledge about experiments while discussing those questions. Also, you will already have a wide range of different examples from the research you have already discussed in class, which will make those topics more interesting for the students. For the last block, I suggest to include some time in the course syllabus for project work. I usually like to let the students in my courses work in groups of four – eventually plus or minus one person – that is the perfect group size. In the course to which I refer in this article, I paired the students and their assignment was to conduct a classroom experiment and to write out the experiment in full, after having tested it in the class and we had discussed it. First it sounds like time off for the lecturer, but it is the opposite: students will need a lot of guidance and feedback. What I found notable was that students often had to return to contents that were discussed earlier in the course; yet when the contents became relevant, they often had to work them out again. (Not at least) those feedbacks 1 URL: http://veconlab.econ.virginia.edu/admin.htm last access, 02.03.2015. 4 concerned topics such as what a good question is and how this question could be answered within an experimental design. Feedback and experiences The article draws on the students´ feedback given via the standardised course evaluation at the end of the course. At this point it is important to mention that the students could select the course as a supplementary course – it was not obligatory. However, courses on (quantitative) methods are not the most popular courses in the Social Science curriculum –based on my experience at the institute I’m working at –, so it is not surprising that not many students voluntarily choose to participate in courses like this one. Hence, it is important to keep in mind that the students’ evaluation was filled in by six students out of eight. All in all we can presume that students participating in the course had an intrinsic motivation. The next two figures give an account of the overall statistics from the evaluation – seven is the highest rating students could chose for evaluating the course and one is the lowest evaluation possible – and the student´s comments. Figure 2: Results of the standardized evaluation of the seminary (n=6)2 Course evaluation (overall values) Overall value Mean Lecturer’s commitment 6,5 Discussions in the course 6,3 Core readings for the course 5,8 Course materials 6,0 2 All results of the evaluation can be found on the following URL: http://www.uni-muenster.de/imperia/md/content/fuchs/lehre/ss_2014experimente_in_der_politikwissenschaft.pdf, access 24.02.2015. 5 Figure 3: Comments from the students Student´s Translation comment 1 A good seminar, notably the small number of students made it very pleasant. The form of examination mad sense to me, and the seminar had a good structure. 2 Very interesting seminar with applied learning through examples! 3 Fantastic course with a comprehendible structure. Because of the examples of political science experiments we discussed during the course the topics were easy to understand and the relevance was also easy to grasp. The evaluation and the comments from the students are overall very positive. From the perspective of the lecturer I would share this impression. At this point I would like to outline some general thoughts about the course: These (three) thoughts circle around the teaching goals of the seminar. On the one hand someone might argue that a course on experimental methods in political science should focus on experiments. Contrary to this I would argue instead (1.) that experiments are a method among others and in bigger research projects they often serve as a complementary approach. Therefore we should consider, in planning a seminar for (quantitative) methods, to teach experiments as one example of organising a research plan and testing a hypothesis. As I argued in the introduction, experiments could be understood as a gold standard of a deductive, hypothesis-testing research design. So as an overall teaching goal it could make sense to define the teaching goals for such a course as the more general understanding of a research process and organizing the seminar – as described in the last section – around this goal: to locate experiments within the methodological landscape, discuss examples and theory about the method, and let the students work on projects. This is important, notably for undergraduate students, like it is true for the next point lecturers might consider before teaching a seminar on a specific method. (2.) Also students should learn to understand themselves as critical recipients of existing studies. Published work, even in top ranged peer-review journals, can contain highly contested assumptions and confusing interpretations of results. Courses for undergraduate students are appropriate places to discuss those findings, including very critical discussion. However, I would never suggest to take bad-practice-articles in consideration for course readings, but students often voice much more criticism about an article than some might expect in advance – even if award-winning articles are chosen as core readings for the course. Beyond the criticism of how scientific articles are (sometimes) written, it is important for students to develop skills for systematically analysing 6 research designs and reading the statistical analysis of an article; this goes beyond summarising an article and its findings, and asks for the development of skills of critical reading and analysis of existing literature. (3.) Sometimes students understand the story you are telling them best after they have heard the story before. I remember confused faces by the students in the first session of the course as I told them that the first thing we were going to do in this kick-of session was to discover the whole plot of what we will learn about experiments. But like a well written thesis – with an introduction, a main part, and a conclusion – a seminar might be constructed in the same sense: Tell the students what you/they are going to do, then do it, then come back to what you have done. Therefore it is not strange to “spoil the plot” in the first session, then to discover how much more difficult the whole story is together with the students, and come back to it in a way that students have to apply what they have learned to their own projects. During the last course sessions, when the students worked in pairs on their little projects, students gave me the feedback that they had to read through (most of) the literature again in order to understand the different research designs they had learned about and had to think about their application to slightly different questions. So there is a clear cut between hearing about something (a method for example), and using the information as knowledge for own work. Last but not last it should be mentioned that teaching goals should be clearly defined by the lecturer and should not be limited to the content of the course; each course offers the students different possibilities to practice their skills in multiple ways. Towards the end of the course it is worth reflecting upon those competences – for this purpose we have to plan which competences we want the students to improve in in advance and then structure the seminar and the teaching methods accordingly. Discussion The goal of the article was to argue that – contesting the prior article in EPS (Hamenstädt, 2012a) – teaching experimental political science is about allowing the students do gain experience with the methods. This means a course should focus on teaching students how to come up with their own (small-scale) experiments by the end of the course. The second line of argumentation in this article is that political scientists have developed and conducted plenty of interesting experiments during the last years. A lot of literature on the experimental methods still draws back on experiments from neighbouring disciplines in social sciences – or even from medical science. Be that as it may, but in teaching experimental methods for political science to students we can now revert to a multiplicity 7 of examples from our own discipline. Our goal should be to make the method understandable; how we can answer scientific questions from our own discipline with the help of the experimental method. That is what a course on experimental methods should offer and that is also what should be taught to students. In bringing forward these two arguments, I showed in the course of the article how to structure a course and what the students’ and my own experiences are. 8 References Blair, A., Curtis, S., and McGinty, S. (2013a) ‘Is Peer Feedback an Effective Approach for Creating Dialogue in Politics?’, European Political Science 12(1): 86–101. Blair, A., Curtis, S., Goodwin, M. and Shields, S. (2013b) ‘What Feedback do Students Want?’, politics 33(1): 66–79. Druckman, J., Green, D., Kuklinski, J. and Lupia, A. (2011) ‘Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Political’, ScienceCambridge: Cambridge University Press. Druckman, J., Green, D., Kuklinski, J. and Lupia, A. (2006) ‘The growth and development of experimental research in political science’, American Political Science Review 100(4): 627–635. Hamenstädt, U. (2012a) ‘Teaching Experimental Political Science: Experiences from a Seminar on Methods’, European Political Science 11(1): 114–127. Hamenstädt, U. (2012b) ‘Die Logik des politikwissenschaftlichen Experiments’, Wiesbaden: VS Verlag. Morton, R. and Williams, K. (2010) ‘Experimental Political Science and the Study of Causality. From Nature to the Lab’, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ryan, M., Clare Saunders, C., Rainsford E. and Thompson E. (2013) ‘Improving Research Methods Teaching and Learning in Politics and International Relations: A ‘Reality Show’ Approach’, politics 34(1): 85–97. Shadish, W., Cook, T. and Campbell, D. (2002) ‘Experimental and Quasi-experimental Designs for Generalized Causal Inference’, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 9 Appendix Figure 4: Course content and list of the core readings and additional literature Block 1 Session Content Core readings Introduction Overview and presentation of the lecture; no required First two classroom experiments readings and first discussion of experimental designs. Milgram-Experiment Imai, K., King, G. and Stuart, E. (2008) ‘Misunderstandings Movie about the Milgram- between experimentalists and observationalists about causal Experiment in Munich in 70s. Discussion of the experimental inference’, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A, “design”, or the design Milgram 171: 481–502. should have used. Druckman, J., Green, D., Kuklinski, J. and Lupia, A. (2011) ‘Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Political Science’, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chapter 1 & 2. Group work Druckman, J., Green, D., Kuklinski, J. and Lupia, A. (2006) ‘The Readings assigned randomly to growth and development of experimental research in political students during the last session. Clarifying what we have learned so far. science’, American Political Science Review 100(4): 627–635. Morton, R. and Williams, K. (2010) ‘Experimentation in Political Science’, in ‘The Oxford Handbook of Political Methodology’, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 339-356. Gerrig, R.J. and Zimbardo, P.G. (UA, 2004) ‘Psychology and Life’, Allyn & Bacon. Chapter 2. Green, D. and Gerber A. (2003): The Underprovision of Experiments in Political Science’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 589: 94-112. 2 Laboratory Iyengar, S. (2011) ‘Laboratory Experiments in Political Experiments Science’, in Druckman, J., Green, D., Kuklinski, J. and Lupia, A. (ed.) ‘Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Political Science’, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chapter 6, pp. 73-88. Mutz, D. (2007) ‘Effects of “in-your-face” television discourse on perceptions of a legitimate opposition’, American Political Science Review 101(4): 621–635. Additional readings: Battaglini, M., Morton and R. Palfrey, T.R. (2010) ‘The Swing 10 Voter’s Curse in the Laboratory’, Review of Economic Studies 77: 61–89 Levine, D.K. and Palfrey, T.R. (2007) ‘The Paradox of Voter Participation A Laboratory Study’, American Political Science Review 101: 143-158. Takezawa, M. Gummerum, M. and Keller, M. (2006) ‘A stage for the rational tail of the emotional dog: Roles of moral reasoning in group decision making’, Journal of Economic Psychology 27: 117–139. Field experiments Gerber, A. (2011) ‘Field Experiments in Political Science’ in Druckman, J., Green, D., Kuklinski, J. and Lupia, A. (ed.) ‘Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Political Science’, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chapter 9, pp. 115138. Olken, B. (2010) ‘Direct democracy and local public goods: Evidence from a field experiment in Indonesia’, American Political Science Review 104(2): 243–267. Additional readings: Bahry, D.L. and Wilson, R.K. (2006) ‘Confusion or fairness in the field? Rejections in the ultimatum game under the strategy method’, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 60: 37–54. Dunning, T. and Harrison, L. (2010) ‘Cross-cutting Cleavages and Ethnic Voting: An Experimental Study of Cousinage in Mali’, American Political Science Review 104(1): 21-39. Gerber, A.S. and Green, D.P. (2000) ‘The Effects of Canvassing, Telephone Calls, and Direct Mail on Voter Turnout: A Field Experiment’, The American Political Science Review 94(3): 653-663. Gerber, A.S. and Green, D.P. (2001) ‘Do Phone Calls Increase Voter Turnout?: A Field Experiment’, The Public Opinion Quarterly 65(1): 75-85. Gerber, A.S., Karlan, D. and Bergan, D. (2009) ‘Does the Media Matter? A Field Experiment Measuring the Effect of Newspapers on Voting Behavior and Political Opinions’, 11 American Economic Journal 1(2): 35-52. Horiuchi, Y., Imai, K. and Taniguchi, N. (2007) ‘Designing and Analyzing Randomized Experiments: Application to a Japanese Election Survey Experiment’, American Journal of Political Science 51(3): 669–687. Levy Paluck, E. and Green, D.P. (2009) ‘Deference, Dissent, and Dispute Resolution: An Experimental Intervention Using Mass Media to Change Norms and Behavior in Rwanda’, American Political Science Review 103(4):622-644. Wantchekon, L. (2003) ‘Clientelism and Voting Behavior. Evidence from a Field Experiment in Benin’, World Politics 55: 399-422. Survey experiments Sniderman (2011) The Logic and Design of the Survey Experiment: An Autobiography of Methodological Innovation’ in Druckman, J., Green, D., Kuklinski, J. and Lupia, A. (ed.) ‘Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Political Science’, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chapter 8, pp. 102114. Hainmueller, J. and Hiscox, M.J. (2010) ‘Attitudes toward Highly Skilled and Low-skilled Immigration: Evidence from a Survey Experiment’, American Political Science Review 104(2): 61-84. Additional readings: Barabas, J. and Jerit, J. (2010) ‘Are Survey Experiments Externally Valid?’, American Political Science Review 104(2): 226-242. Hall, L., Johansson, P. and Strandberg, T. (2012) ‘Lifting the Veil of Morality: Choice Blindness and Attitude Reversals on a Self-Transforming Survey’, PLoS ONE 7(9). Natural experiments Robinson, G., McNulty. J.E. and Krasno J.S. (2009) ‘Observing the Counterfactual? The Search for Political Experiments in Nature’, Political Analysis 17: 341–357. Whitt, S. and Wilson R.K. (2007) ‘Public Goods in the Field: Katrina Evacuees in Houston’, Southern Economic Journal, Symposium 74(2): 377–387: 12 Additional readings: Elis, R., Malhotra, N. and Meredith, M. (2009) ‘Apportionment Cycles as Natural Experiments’, Political Analysis 17: 358-376. Green, D.P., Leong, T.Y., Kern, H.L., Gerber, A.S. and Larimer, C.W. (2009) ‘Testing the Accuracy of Regression Discontinuity Analysis Using Experimental Benchmarks’, Political Analysis 17: 400-417. Kern, H.L. and Hainmueller, J. (2009) ‘Opium for the Masses: How Foreign Media Can Stabilize Authoritarian Regimes’, Political Analysis 17: 377-399. McNulty, J.E., Dowling, C.M. and Ariotti, M.H. (2009) ‘Driving Saints to Sin: How Increasing the Difficulty of Voting Dissuades Even the Most Motivated Voters’, Political Analysis 17. Sekhon, J.S. and Titiunik, R. (2012) ‘When Natural Experiments Are Neither Natural Nor Experiments’, American Political Science Review 106(1): 33-57. Wilson, R.K. and Eckel, C.C. (2010) ‘Trust and Social Exchange’, in Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Political Science, Boston: Cambridge University Press. Chapter 17: 243-257. 3 Causality Druckman, J., Green, D., Kuklinski, J. and Lupia, A. (2011) ‘Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Political Science’, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chapter 2. Morton, R. and Williams, K. (2010) ‘Experimental Political Science and the Study of Causality. From Nature to the Lab’, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Capter 3 on Causality. Additional readings: Camerer, C.F. and Hogarth, R.M. (1999) ‘The Effects of Financial Incentives in Experiments: A Review and CapitalLabor-Production Framework’, Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 19(1-3): 7-42. Validity McDermott, R. (2002) ‘Experimental methods in political science’, Annual Review of Political Science 5: 31–61. Morton, R. and Williams, K. (2010) ‘Experimental Political Science and the Study of Causality. From Nature to the Lab’, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chapter 7, pp. 75- 13 100. Additional readings: Blanton, H. and Jaccard, J. (2008) ‘Representing Versus Generalizing: Two Approaches to External Validity and Their Implications for the Study of Prejudice’, Psychological Inquiry 19: 99–105. Levitt, S.D. and List, J.A. (2007) ‘Viewpoint: On the generalizability of lab behaviour to the field’, Canadian Journal of Economics 40(2): 347-370. Lucas, J.W. (2003) ‘Theory-Testing, Generalization, and the Problem of External Validity’, Sociological Theory 21(3): 236253. Ethics Hertwig, R. and Ortmann, A. (2008) ‘Deception in Experiments: Revisiting the Arguments in Its Defense’, Ethics & Behavior 18(1): 59-92. Additional readings: Bonetti, S. (1998) ‘Experimental economics and deception’, Journal of Economic Psychology 19: 377-395. Bortolotti, L. and Mameli, M. (2006) ‘Deception in Psychology: Moral Costs And Benefits Of Unsought Self-Knowledge’, Accountability in Research 13: 259–275. Richter, E.D., Barach, P., Berman, T., Ben-David, G. and Weinberger, Z. (2001) ‘Extending the boundaries of the Declaration of Helsinki: a case study of an unethical experiment in a non-medical setting’, Journal of Medical Ethics 27: 126–129. Stodder, J. (1998) ‘Experimental Moralities: Ethics in Classroom Experiments’, The Journal of Economic Education 29(2): 127-138. Weisburd, D. (2003) ‘Ethical Practice and Evaluation of Interventions in Crime and Justice: The Moral Imperative for Randomized Trials’, Evaluation Review 27(3): 336-354. 14 4 Software and Fischbacher, U. (2007) ‘z-tree: Zurich toolbox for ready-made student´s projects economic experiments’, Experimental Economics 10(2): 171– Introduction to R and z-tree by 178. the lecturer. Morton, R. and Williams, K. (2010) ‘Experimental Political Students worked during this time Science and the Study of Causality. From Nature to the Lab’, on their projects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Capter 15 and To Do List. Isabelle Boutron, Peter John and David J. Torgerson (2010) ‘Reporting Methodological Items in Randomized Experiments in Political Science’, The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 628: 112-131. (notably the pp. 121123) 15
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