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| Field Experiment in Politics× | Difference-in-Means Estimator× | |
|---|---|---|
| Field | Political Science | Political Science |
| Family | Process / pipeline | Process / pipeline |
| Year of origin≠ | 2000 | 1923 |
| Originator≠ | Gerber & Green (modern political field experiments) | Jerzy Neyman (design-based potential-outcomes framework) |
| Type≠ | Randomized experiment conducted in a real political setting | Design-based estimator of the average treatment effect |
| 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. DOI ↗ | Gerber, A. S., & Green, D. P. (2012). Field Experiments: Design, Analysis, and Interpretation. New York: W. W. Norton. ISBN: 9780393979954 |
| Aliases | Political field experiment, Get-out-the-vote experiment, GOTV experiment, Voter mobilization experiment | Neyman estimator, Design-based ATE estimator, Difference of sample means, Mean-difference treatment effect estimator |
| 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. | The difference-in-means estimator is the design-based workhorse for analyzing randomized experiments: it estimates the average treatment effect simply as the difference between the average outcome among treated units and the average outcome among control units. Rooted in Jerzy Neyman's potential-outcomes framework and central to modern treatments by Imbens and Rubin and by Gerber and Green, it is unbiased under randomization, comes with a conservative Neyman variance estimator, and supports exact randomization inference, requiring no model of how outcomes are generated. |
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