Experiments in and on political institutions

Experiments are a powerful method to test for causal relationships implied by theory and assess whether policy interventions are effective. In the last 15 years, the literature on political institutions has been at the forefront of advances in experimental methods. In this chapter, we review two broad categories of experiments that have been used to study political institutions. First, we discuss experiments designed to measure institutions, including audit and survey experiments. Second, we consider experiments designed to test their effects, including nudging and recruitment experiments, experiments that subject institutions to new conditions, such as increased transparency or information, and experiments that modify institutional rules or introduce new institutions at the local level. We argue that there is currently a significant opportunity for existing experimental designs to be applied to new contexts, and for knowledge to be aggregated across experiments to better understand how the same treatments work in different conditions.