(Courtesy Journal of Experimental Political Science)
As we all hold our collective breath waiting for the outcome of Thursday’s Scottish independence referendum, I thought I would take this opportunity to share with readers the exciting news that the new Journal of Experimental Political Science (JEPS), which I am co-editing with my colleague Rebecca Morton, has published its inaugural issue! Potentially even more exciting is that all the of the articles in the issue can be downloaded for free by clicking on the following links:
Rebecca B. Morton and Joshua A. Tucker: Welcome to JEPS!
Dawn Brancati: Building Confidence in Elections: The Case of Electoral Monitors in Kosova
David Stadelmann, Marco Portmann and Reiner Eichenberger: Full Transparency of Politicians’ Actions Does Not Increase the Quality of Political Representation
Toby Bolsen, James N. Druckman and Fay Lomax Cook: Communication and Collective Actions: A Survey Experiment on Motivating Energy Conservation in the U.S.
Omar Al-Ubaydii, Kevin McCabe and Peter Twieg: Can More Be Less? An Experimental Test of the Resource Curse
Yanna Krupnikov and Adam Seth Levine: Cross Sample Comparisons and External Validity
Alan Gerber, Kevin Arceneaux, Cherly Boudreau, Conor Dowling, Sunshine Hillygus, Thomas Palfrey, Daniel R. Biggers and David J. Hendry: Reporting Guidelines for Experimental Research: A Report from the Experimental Research Section Standards Committee
The journal, published by Cambridge University Press, was established to provide a common space to publish research that uses experimental methodology to study politics and political behavior. It is the official journal of the Organized Section of the American Political Science Association on Experimental Research. As regular readers of this blog will no doubt be aware, experiments have become an increasingly important part of the research portfolio of political scientists in recent years. What readers may be less aware of is that there’s a wide variety of experiments used in the study of politics, including survey experiments, lab experiments, field experiments, “quasi-natural” experiments and even neurological experiments. JEPS aims to collect the best examples of all of these types experiments, along with articles about best practices for conducting experiments and methods for analyzing experimental data, in a single journal.
The first issue nicely highlights a variety of experiments, including a field experiment analyzing the effect of election monitors on attitudes toward elections and turnout in Kosovo; an experiment that uses the game Second Life as a virtual laboratory; an assessment of how a move to full transparency in parliamentary debates affected the quality of political representation in Switzerland; and a methodological assessment of the effects of using different (student and adult general population) samples in a series of framing experiments.
For a more thorough overview of the contents of the first issue, as well as a general statement of the journal’s approach and goals, you can see our editorial note introducing the first issue. I’ll also go into more detail on some of these articles in future posts here at The Monkey Cage. But for now, feel free to browse the journal online (for free!), and we hope you enjoy it!