The fact that many citizens fail to vote is often cited to motivate others to vote. Psychological research on descriptive social norms suggests that emphasizing the opposite – that many do vote – would be a more effective message. In two get-out-the-vote field experiments, we find that...

A secret ballot is implemented to free voters to choose candidates without fear of economic or social repercussions, but the extent to which the secrecy achieves this goal depends on whether people believe their choices are kept secret, rather than whether they actually are. Findings from a...

The debate about the cost-effectiveness of randomized field experiments ignores one of the most important uses of experimental data. This article defines and illustrates "downstream" experimental analysis - that is, analysis of the indirect effects of experimental interventions. We argue that...

Missing outcome data plague many randomized experiments. Common solutions rely on ignorability assumptions that may not be credible in all applications. We propose a method for confronting missing outcome data that makes fairly weak assumptions but can still yield informative bounds on the...

In the social sciences, randomized experimentation is the optimal research design for establishing causation. However, for a number of practical reasons, researchers are sometimes unable to conduct experiments and must rely on observational data. In an effort to develop estimators that can...

Until recently, the study of voting behavior was dominated by survey research. Concerned that survey data may provide an inadequate basis for causal inference, scholars in recent years have turned to field experimentation, which relies on random assignment of voters to treatment and control...