Method evidence record

Natural Experiment in Politics

A natural experiment in political science exploits a naturally occurring source of as-if random assignment — close elections, lotteries, arbitrary boundaries, or policy thresholds — to identify causal effects without the researcher manipulating anything. Codified for the social sciences by Thad Dunning's 2012 design-based treatment and exemplified by David Lee's close-election regression-discontinuity analysis of U.S. House races, the approach treats nature, institutions, or chance as if they had run an experiment, recovering credible causal estimates from observational data when randomization is impossible.

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Natural Experiment in Political Science (As-If Random Assignment)

Taxonomic method record · process-pipeline / political-science

Dunning, T. (2012). Natural Experiments in the Social Sciences: A Design-Based Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. · ISBN 9781107698000
Lee, D. S. (2008). Randomized experiments from non-random selection in U.S. House elections. Journal of Econometrics, 142(2), 675–697. · DOI 10.1016/j.jeconom.2007.05.004

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Related methods

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Same method familyDifference-in-Means Estimatormachine-suggested · Relational suggestion, not evidence.Same method familyField Experiment in Politicsmachine-suggested · Relational suggestion, not evidence.Same method familyNatural Experimentmachine-suggested · Relational suggestion, not evidence.Same method familyRegression Discontinuity in Electionsmachine-suggested · Relational suggestion, not evidence.