Causal Inference And American Political Development

Causal Inference and American Political Development

This volume discusses the application of causal inference techniques in the study of American political development (APD). Within political science, a movement focused on increasing the credibility of causal inferences (CI) has gained considerable traction in recent years. While CI has been incorporated extensively into most disciplinary subfields, it has not been applied often in the study of APD. This edited volume considers ways in which scholars of CI and APD can engage in mutually beneficial ways to produce better overall research.

Special Issue: Causal Inference and American Political Development

Experimental Political Science and the Study of Causality

Increasingly, political scientists use the term 'experiment' or 'experimental' to describe their empirical research. One of the primary reasons for doing so is the advantage of experiments in establishing causal inferences. In this book, Rebecca B. Morton and Kenneth C. Williams discuss in detail how experiments and experimental reasoning with observational data can help researchers determine causality. They explore how control and random assignment mechanisms work, examining both the Rubin causal model and the formal theory approaches to causality. They also cover general topics in experimentation such as the history of experimentation in political science; internal and external 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 issues in experimentation, the process of securing approval from institutional review boards for human subject research, and the use of deception in experimentation.