Voting Experiments

This book contains 16 contributions that were presented in the workshop ’Voting experiments’, organized by the editors in Montreal on March 28-29, 2014. This workshop, where presentations were selected after an open call for papers, was organized within the framework of the Making Electoral Democracy Work Project (http://electoraldemocracy.com/). The objective of (most of) the voting experiments presented in this book is to understand how different facets of the voters’ political and social environment influence their voting decisions. These experiments use a variety a methods – the book includes laboratory experiments, survey experiments and field experiments - but as experiments they all share a common denominator. In order to study the impact of the environment on voting decisions, they vary in a controlled way some key aspect of the environment in which the voter makes decisions in order to detect and isolate its effect on voting behavior. As any research method, experiments raise a number of methodological issues. The last part of the book presents some experiments which, in various ways, address issues raised by the experimental design and/or offer examples of methodological innovations