Experimental Designs for Political Communication Research: Using New Technology and Online Participant Pools to Overcome the Problem of Generalizability

As recently as three decades ago, the use of experimental methods was a rarity in the disciplines of political science, sociology, and communications. Beginning in the early 1980s, a surge of interest in the interdisciplinary field of political psychology set in motion a trickle of experimental methods into several subfields of political science, including political communication. But despite the increased interest, longstanding concerns over the artificiality of experimental settings, the unrepresentativeness of experimental subject pools, and the questionable generalizability of experimental findings has continued to impede the further diffusion of experimental methods.