Field Experiments on Elected and Public Officials

Field experimentation in political science has primarily been conducted on citizens. In some instances, field experiments examine the effect of treatments such as get-out-the-vote messages on public behavior, where the messages to voters provide essentially no risk to subjects and may even be normatively beneficial (De Rooij, Green and Gerber 2009). In these and other instances in which scholars study ordinary people, a university’s Institutional Review Board (IRB) approves studies, giving the official stamp of approval to a study.