Deliberative Field Experiments

AbstractDeliberative democrats aim to reform real-world politics. This goal, however, poses a dilemma for researchers assessing deliberation. Researchers can study deliberation through controlled but artificial laboratory and survey experiments. They can confidently infer causality (high internal validity) but cannot be sure that deliberation will operate the same way in applied politics (low external validity). Meanwhile, researchers can observe naturally occurring deliberation in realistic settings. In this case, they can be confident that the patterns they find are politically relevant (high external validity) but cannot be sure that they represent causal relationships (low internal validity). Without causality, however, scholars of deliberation cannot know whether reforms—changes to the system—will work as intended. Deliberative field experiments can help resolve this dilemma by conducting real experiments on real politics (achieving high internal and external validity). Like any research method, though, field experiments have their pitfalls, and so they are no panacea. This chapter explains the concept and mechanics of deliberative field experiments, links them to broader theories of deliberative democracy, and characterizes the kinds of questions that they are well suited to answering. The chapter concludes by discussing some of the limitations of deliberative field experiments and how they can be combined with other research methods to assess the promise and perils of deliberative reform more thoroughly.