The SAGE Handbook of Political Science, Vol. 1(2), March 2020, ch.22.
The past twenty years have witnessed a sharp increase in the use of experimentation in political science, from field experiments to on-line experimental surveys. This chapter provides a review of the theoretical foundations, the advantages, and the challenges of the experimental methodology both in theory and in practice. Instead of providing a broad analysis of all types of experimental studies, I focus on political economy experiments: incentivized, controlled, laboratory experiments which main goal is to test theoretical predictions and conjectures. I discuss the conceptual features that set political economy experiments apart from other types of experiments and offer a glimpse on the development of this methodology.
The Journal of Experimental Political Science, Vol. 6(1), Spring 2019, 17–32.
A number of theoretical and empirical studies analyze the effect of inclement weather on voter turnout and in turn on parties’ vote share. However, empirical findings suggest that the effect of weather on parties’ vote share is greater than can be explained by its influence on voter turnout alone. This paper provides experimental evidence of the effect of weather on vote choice between more- versus less-risky candidates. Findings show that bad weather depresses risk tolerance, that is, voters are less likely to vote for risky candidates. This effect is sizable and statistically significant.
The Journal of Politics, Vol. 79(1), January 2017, 250–68.
In parliamentary democracies, political parties bargain over cabinet portfolios when forming coalition governments. While most of the theoretical literature predicts that only minimal winning coalitions form in equilibrium, the empirical evidence shows that minority and surplus coalitions are about as frequent. In this article, I bridge the gap between the theoretical predictions and the empirical evidence by developing a non-cooperative bargaining model in which parties are both office seeking and policy pursuing. Parties bargain over cabinet portfolios, which in turn determines the government policy. Parties are farsighted, and when they coalesce with other parties, they take into account not only the expected cabinet portfolio allocation, but also how this allocation would affect the government coalition policy. The model predicts in equilibrium the formation of minimal winning as well as minority and surplus coalitions as a function of a
party’s size, ideal policies, and relative preference for policy versus office.
Journal of Theoretical Politics, Vol. 27(1), January 2015, 58–85.
This article presents experiments that analyze the strategic behavior of voters under three voting systems: plurality rule, approval voting, and the Borda count. Applying a level-k reasoning model approach, strategic behavior is found to be significantly different under each treatment (voting system). Plurality rule leads voters to play in the most sophisticated (i.e. best response), but not necessarily insincere, manner. Thus, this voting system displays at the same time the highest incidence of best responses and of sincere votes. The opposite holds for the Borda count games, where voters depart from their sincere strategy the most, without playing the best response strategy. Approval voting shows intermediate levels of sophistication and sincere behavior.
Games, Vol. 5, 2014, 26–54.
This paper presents an experiment that evaluates the effect of financial incentives and complexity in political science voting experiments. To evaluate the effect of complexity we adopt a level-k reasoning model concept. This model (Nagel, 1995) postulates that players might be of different types, each corresponding to the level of reasoning in which they engage. Furthermore, to postulate the effect of financial incentives on subjects’ choice, we used the Quantal Response Equilibrium (QRE) concept. In a QRE, players’ decisions are noisy, with the probability of playing a given strategy increasing in its expected payoff. Hence, the choice probability is function of the magnitude of the financial incentives. Our results show that low complexity promotes the highest degree of level-k strategic reasoning in every payment treatment. Standard financial incentives are enough to induce equilibrium behavior, and the marginal effect of extra incentives on equilibrium behavior seems to be negligible. High complexity, instead, decreases the rate of convergence to equilibrium play. With a sufficiently high complexity, increasing payoff amounts does promote more strategic behavior in a significant manner. Our results show with complex voting games, higher financial incentives are required for the subjects to exert the effort needed to complete the task.
Coauthor: K. Williams