Compare methods

	Field Experiment in Politics	Audit Experiment
Field	Political Science	Political Science
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2000	2011
Originator	Gerber & Green (modern political field experiments)	Butler & Broockman (political responsiveness audits); Bertrand & Mullainathan (correspondence-audit lineage)
Type	Randomized experiment conducted in a real political setting	Randomized field experiment using matched fictitious requests
Seminal source	Gerber, A. S., & Green, D. P. (2000). The Effects of Canvassing, Telephone Calls, and Direct Mail on Voter Turnout: A Field Experiment. American Political Science Review, 94(3), 653–663.	Butler, D. M., & Broockman, D. E. (2011). Do Politicians Racially Discriminate Against Constituents? A Field Experiment on State Legislators. American Journal of Political Science, 55(3), 463–477.
Aliases	Political field experiment, Get-out-the-vote experiment, GOTV experiment, Voter mobilization experiment	Correspondence study, Field audit study, Discrimination audit, Responsiveness audit
Related	4	4
Summary	A field experiment in political science randomizes a real intervention — such as a get-out-the-vote canvass, mailing, or phone call — among genuine political actors in their natural environment and compares behavioral outcomes like validated turnout. Revived for the discipline by Gerber and Green's 2000 voter-mobilization study and codified in their 2012 textbook, the approach combines the causal leverage of randomization with the realism of consequential, real-world settings, while carefully distinguishing the effect of being assigned a treatment from the effect of actually receiving it.	An audit experiment, also called a correspondence or field audit study, sends matched but fictitious requests to real-world targets — such as legislators, landlords, or employers — while randomizing a single treatment cue, then compares the rate and quality of responses. In political science the canonical design follows Butler and Broockman's 2011 study of U.S. state legislators, which varied the putative race signaled by a constituent's name to measure discrimination in responsiveness.