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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Sources
- 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 ↗
How to cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). Natural Experiment in Political Science (As-If Random Assignment). ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/en/political-science/natural-experiment-politics
Which method?
Set this method beside its closest kin and read them side by side — the library lays the books on the table; the choice is yours.
- Difference-in-Means EstimatorPolitical Science↔ compare
- Field Experiment in PoliticsPolitical Science↔ compare
- Natural ExperimentExperimental design↔ compare
- Regression Discontinuity in ElectionsPolitical Science↔ compare