Citizens' preferences form the foundation of democratic governance. When they form their preferences, they typically do so in the presence of different types of competing arguments that reach them at different times. Surprisingly, public opinion research offers little guidance on how competition...

Randomized experiments commonly compare subjects receiving a treatment to subjects receiving a placebo. An alternative design, frequently used in field experimentation, compares subjects assigned to an untreated baseline group to subjects assigned to a treatment group, adjusting statistically...

In recent years, social scientists have increasingly turned to matching as a method for drawing causal inferences from observational data. Matching compares those who receive a treatment to those with similar background attributes who do not receive a treatment. Researchers who use matching...

The powerful relationship between education and voter turnout is arguably the most well-documented and robust finding in American survey research. Yet the causal interpretation of this relationship remains controversial, with many authors suggesting that the apparent link between education and...

Deference and dissent strike a delicate balance in any polity. Insufficient deference to authority may incapacitate government, whereas too much may allow leaders to orchestrate mass violence. Although cross-national and cross-temporal variation in deference to authority and willingness to...

Experimental researchers routinely use regression in order to control for pre-treatment covariates. This practice has become controversial in the wake of recent demonstrations showing that this type of regression is prone to bias in small samples. Bias may even remain when units are sampled from...

Prior to the November 6, 2001 elections, randomized voter mobilization experiments were conducted in Bridgeport, Columbus, Detroit, Minneapolis, Raleigh, and St. Paul. Names appearing on official lists of registered voters were randomly assigned to treatment and control groups. A few days before...

Political campaigns currently make extensive use of direct mail, particularly in state and local races, yet its effects on voter behavior are not well understood. This essay presents the results of large-scale randomized field experiments conducted in Connecticut and New Jersey during state and...